Unrepentant Snark: Dear Civilians

--> Some musings directed towards civilians looking to book, hire, interview, solicit or otherwise interfere with stripperfolk, especially as the season of the holiday party once again closes in upon us, and based upon a decade of various communications received:

• Yes, admission to my show was $15. No, you cannot hire me to do that same act at your private party for that same $15.

• A producer is not a Rolodex; if you want her to “send a couple girls” to your party, you will pay a booking fee.

• Don’t ever ask a producer to “send a couple girls” to your party.

• Would you show up entirely alone at a stranger’s house because they ‘sounded nice in the email?’ Neither would we. This is why you pay for a handler.

• Would you show up at a stranger’s house with the blithe assumption that you’ll most certainly get paid after your performance? Neither would we. This is why you pay a deposit.

• Here’s a scenario:

“Hi there, Worker Bee, this is the Boss. We’d like you to go to a sales conference in Shanghai. It’s only two hours long, and since we’re such a benevolent and altruistic corporation we’re going to pay you a hundred dollars for that two hours. How’s that, huh? … What’s that? No, you’ll have to buy the plane tickets … No, no we won’t be compensating you for the 72 hours of travel time either. But a hundred dollars, huh? Can’t beat that.”

Geography is tricky, I know, but here’s a good rule of thumb: if we can’t take the subway home* after the gig - be it a private party or an out-of-town venue - then you’ll need to cover the travel expenses.

• Drink tickets are not currency and “the chance to hang out after the show with some really cool people” does not pay the rent.

• I’ve never understood the assumption that if someone is a good burlesque performer, they’ll also be good at “walkaround.” (Let’s face it, I don’t understand the concept of “walkaround” entertainment that isn’t actually doing something, like close-up magic or tarot readings or making balloon animals.) If someone can satisfactorily explain to me what about my stage performance as a stripping sandwich implies that I’ll be stellar at talking to guests at your party while wearing a sexy devil tail then I’ll … go to your sales conference in Shanghai.

• It’s just great that you’re part of a small and wildly unsuccessful theatre company - and it’s really neat that along with your aggressive IndieGo-go campaign and asking your aunts and cousins for non-tax-deductible donations to produce your site-specific all-female free-verse adaptation of Death Of A Salesman, you’ve decided to put together a super-fun benefit with all kinds of wacky acts and some great raffle prizes from the yoga studio downstairs and five-dollar-a-glass-suggested-donation pink wine, and as a fellow artist you just know I’d jump at the networking opportunity of performing three numbers for free on a Saturday night in a warehouse in Bushwick, because I’ll have a great time hanging out and mingling afterwards and supporting the arts. Really. That’s just swell.

• Before you hit ‘send,’ glance over that email and see if it anywhere contains the phrase “no pay but opportunity for exposure.” Now replace that with “I will skull-fuck your grandmother’s corpse in the middle of the kids’ table during your next Thanksgiving dinner,” and decide if you still want to send it.

• Yes, I am an experienced and skilled professional in my chosen field. No, you cannot “pick my brain for a couple of hours” over a cup of coffee.

• Once upon a time the public school system taught things like elocution and correspondence. We had typing classes and practiced business interviews and learned how to tuck in our shirts. And then they invented the internet and everything went completely to hell.

Here’s a sample cold email, just to prove that it can still be done correctly:

“Hello Ms Performer;

I am putting together a holiday party for my office that will take place at a Midtown restaurant on the night of Friday, December 17^th. We’re interested in booking a classic burlesque act as part of the evening’s entertainment, and I’m writing to inquire about your rates and availability. Please feel free to call or email me at your convenience, and I’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have as well. I look forward to speaking with you.

Thanks,

A. Reasonable Request”

And here’s an actual FaceTube message I (and, apparently, more than a few other performers) received some little while ago:

“i need a show this Tuesday with 3-4 girls. can you swing it? 10pm show”

I would hope that my 8^th grade Business Practices teacher is not required to explain this one.

* I’ve heard that in some parts of the world private citizens actually own their own automobiles, though I don't entirely believe this. The premise is the nonetheless the same.

In My Atelier

The 15 Most Useful Items In My Very Swanky & Very Well-Appointed Atelier

--> In addition to the ecydiastical* enterprises, I'm a professional seamstress & costumer and a lifelong crafter - and consequently, I've found that some tools and items are simply indispensable to me. You can spend a lot of money on the 'professional' version of pretty much anything (and there are some things that, ultimately, you do just have to pony up and pay for); but there are a lot of things I use constantly that cost little to nothing (especially to anyone with a frugal New England background and/or mild hoarding tendencies). Here's my list of the 15 most useful super-cheap costuming supplies I use every day:

• Disposable Chinese-takeout chopsticks - I hoard these like the treasure that they are. Useful for most gluing projects (wet or hot**), a lot of painting and mixing, stirring dye baths, propping up things while they dry and - in a pinch - as the stick for various commemorative pennants.

And since I live in New York and we get a lot of takeout ...

• Disposable Chinese-takeout containers -The sad loss of those fetching little folded takeout boxes of my childhood did result in one good thing: cheap storage for a variety of odds and ends in the form of plastic takeout containers. (They're also terribly useful as easily-cuttable bases for hats, headdresses, and various other construction projects.)

• Alcohol prep pads - At under $5 a box, these little babies are totally worth having on hand. I use them chiefly for cleaning stray glue off of tweezers during large-scale crystalling projects, or for getting the goo off of any tool (or body part) when it becomes, well, gooey.

• Every single Ziploc baggie of every size and description that enters my life - The tiny ones are great for separating out a couple of buttons or half a dozen googly eyes; the large ones make a handy rain hat or temporary shelter. Seriously, though, pretty much every object in my studio (and costume storage room) gets sorted into its own baggie at some point; with so many things around all the time I find it's the only way to keep everything (relatively) neat and - most importantly - quickly findable.

• Spare comic book backing boards - For some reason I ended up with a butt-ton of these. They're a convenient size to store and a great balance of flexible/cutable but also sturdy. I use them for catching drips from my elderly glue gun, stiffening headdresses, packing up pasties for shipping, and - well, all my small-piece-of-cardboard needs. (Which are legion.)

• Clear nailpolish - Just the cheapest 99-cent version will keep the cut ends of cords and fringes from unraveling; seal in paint or glitter in small areas and keep it from chipping; make things a little shinier and protect the backs of kinda-scratchy things from catching on fabrics and trims.

• Black nailpolish - I actually raid the nailpolish drawer a lot for craft projects, but I find black is the color I use the most. Is that silver snap, magnet, zipper pull or fastener glaringly bright and hideously non-matching? Hit it with some appropriately-colored nail polish (a thin coat won't affect the grabability of most snaps or magnets) and it disappears. (This is also a great way to get rid of printed-on logos and labels on the bottoms of shoes.)

While we're raiding the beauty supplies ...

• Emery boards - Which is what my grandmother always called nail files. There are times when you need a big he-man-sized piece of actual sandpaper, but more often than not (shaping the ends pf plastic boning***, for example) just a cheap nail file will do.

• Darice gems - Living where I do I can't always find these chain-craft-store acrylic crystals, but when I do come across them I stock up quite literally by the bushel. Personally I use just acrylics on a lot of my costumes, but even if you're of the Swarovski-or-Nothing School of Bling it's worth having a bag of multicolored, multi-sized acrylics on hand for quick projects. I adore Darice: the colors are super bright and they're the shiniest acrylics I've ever found (and the silver backing tends to bubble less than other brands when in contact with the more toxic glues and epoxies). Plus they're, like, $12 a pound. A POUND - at that price, you could fill up the bathtub just for the hell of it.

• The silver straight pins that men's shirts are packaged with - Okay, this might be where my own personal Crazy starts to show, but I actually prefer these pins to any that I've ever bought in a sewing-supply store. They're longer, sharper and they don't bend as much ... and salvaging them from The Man's shirt purchases before he throws them out makes me feel delightfully Dickensian. (Yeah, I'm probably crazy.)

• Dollar-store electrical tape - But specifically the cheap-ass dollar-store version, which is sticky enough to stick, but not so actually effective as to stick forever. I keep a couple of spare rolls on hand specifically for wrapping my fingertips while I'm batching pasties: hot-gluing 200 pairs at once tends to burn the crap out of your hands (and ruin your manicure), no matter how careful you are (and I'm not very careful), but gloves either melt (latex) or make you too clumsy (rubber). I wrap up my fingertips in crappy electrical tape, and if they get too covered in glue I just peel off the tape and re-wrap.

• Måla kids' drawing paper roll from Ikea - This shit is the the bomb, yo. It's way cheaper than the exact same thing in an Expensive Fancy-Ass Art Store (only $5 a roll), it's sturdy enough to draft durable sewing pattern pieces (I tend to not like actual 'pattern paper;' I also tend to re-use patterns until they disintegrate) and it's decent enough paper for actual sketching.

• Clamp lights galore - My personal combination of weird apartment ceiling lights and insomnia means that I work a lot in the middle of the night in very bad lighting. These lamps are around $6 each at every damn hardware store in the world and they're great for general lighting or for focusing on a small area for close work.

Speaking of hardware stores (which, by the way, I adore) ...

• Aluminum drywall t-square - Because sometimes you need to draw 4-foot-long straight lines and right angles. Seriously.

• LED Headlamp - Did I mention the bad apartment lighting? This is genius for really close-up work: strap this fucker to your head and you get an instant spotlight on whatever you point your face at. (The added bonus is that you look like a total idiot: The Man once caught me sitting on the living room floor in the middle of the night, wearing sweatpants and my headlamp, watching Futurama and gluing crystals with disposable chopsticks, and immediately dubbed me 'The Next Dita.' Glamour!)
 

... Like I said, there are plenty of times when cheaping out costs you more money in the long run (If you sew a lot, get a decent ironing board and invest in a good pair of scissors) or when you really do need the actual tool actually created for the job. But over the years I've thrown out enough optimistically-purchased items in favor of A Folded Up Piece Of Paper to have learned that ultimately, you just need to use whatever damn thing works best for you.


* Look it up.
** That's what she said.
*** Heh. "Boning."

Striptease on Film: THE SILENCERS (1966)

--> Take four and a half minutes out of your life to watch this (actually, you should take 102 minutes and watch the whole movie sometime because it's delightful, but in the meantime just the opening credits will do):

This is The Silencers, Columbia Pictures’ 1966 spy spoof featuring sexy secret agent Matt Helm (Dean Martin) and a whole lot of jet-set-fabulousness. I’ll leave the film trivia to Wikipedia and IMDb (although I will say, as a point of interest: Cyd Charisse’s singing was almost always dubbed on film, in this case by a young Vikki Carr*). A strange series of happy accidents fueled by out-of-date tech led me to this film, and needless to say I was pretty much hooked on the basis of the credits alone.

What I want to know is the story of this title sequence: Who were these women? Were they actors, dancers, or actual burlesque strippers? (I don't recognize any of them; and I'm pretty certain that any legend who appeared in a Dean Martin movie - even if it wasn't technically with Dino - would have mentioned it pretty significantly. I met Joel Grey at a party once and I haven't stopped talking about it for a decade. He was wearing a tie with bunnies on it, you know.) Also and of course, I will be eternally frustrated that we never get to see the end of any of these numbers, 1960's Hollywood being what it was, but I like to think they filmed it all. (It is a cherished dream that footage exists somewhere and someday the interweb will acquire it. Now you know what to get me for my birthday.)

I don't tend to draw a lot of direct and specific inspiration from classic performances - my aesthetic is very different, I don't really dance so much as try not to trip while in heels, and glamour as far as I'm concerned is a thing that happens to other people ... but something about this particular moment in striptease time (and Hollywood and fashion and advertising and all that) delights the hell out of me. There's a wonderful mix of high-glam and sex-kitten looseness: Sure, I'll spend two hours getting my hair done to go to the supper club, but if a few curls happen to tumble out when I take my shoes off and run through the fountain outside, well then rowr.

... also like the then-relatively-new Bond films, the Matt Helm series features its own bunch of fantastic character names: Lovey Kravezit, Coco Duquette, Yu-Rang ( *shudder*) and a crew of henchwomen known as the Slaygirls (wait, I've changed my mind: that's what I want for my birthday).

There is fortunately a lot of great classic striptease on film, from Teaserama to Christopher Walken's brilliant number in Pennies From Heaven (Go. Watch. NOW. It's manlesque circa 1981); as one of my own favorites, I'd like to add The Silencers to the list. **

* Who was born Florencia Bisenta de Casillas Martinez Cardona. Which is a fabulous name. That’s all.

** By the way, the second movie in the Matt Helm series, Murderer's Row (also 1966) co-stars a ridiculously sexy young Ann-Margret. Also Karl Malden, for whom I have a permanent soft spot.

TechEtiquette for Burlesque Performers

--> TechEtiquette #1: 

The Food Of Life, aka Music

It’s odd that I – I, who require people to explain things like Skype and Instagram and electricity to me on a regular basis, I who still own a Walkman but won’t have a microwave in my house – it is profoundly odd that I should begin this endeavor with something as out-of-character as technological advice. After all, when I started performing people still brought their music to gigs on cassette tapes.

And yet, here we are in 2012 still rolling (and twirling) along – and somehow, half of you strippers out there still don’t know what “dpi” means, or how to get you music to a DJ in a playable fashion. Well if I can learn, then so can you.

So let’s start with one of the basics of almost every performance: music. Gone are the days of cassette tapes – hell, I can’t actually remember the last time I even brought CD’s to a gig; now 95% of the time producers require digital files sent in advance. Sure, this means you actually have to pick out your act for any given show ahead of time; but it also means that there’s no more scratched and skipping CD’s; no “Wait, stop, it’s track 4 not track 6! Can I start over?”; and no two performers showing up to the gig with the same song. Believe me, this is all a huge improvement.

Part of being a professional burlesque performer in 2012 (and for the sake of this column: if you are receiving payment in exchange for your performance, you are a professional) therefore involves getting your music and stage information to producers by their deadline, and in a format they can use.

Chances are, you’re not the only performer in the show. A producer (or stage manager, or DJ, or sound op) is dealing with 3 to 40 acts on any given night – and all their music and cues. That producer knows that in order to organize those 3 to 40 performances, she has to have music and information by a specific date; so by not sending your music when she needs it you’re making her job that much harder. (And remember, her job is ultimately to create a great show where you and all the performers look fabulous and have all the tech support you need.) I cannot calculate the amount of time I’ve spent frantically calling and texting and messaging performers two hours before a show to extract music and cues from them, when I should have had it days before.

A professional producer (or her stage manager) will send an email to performers well before the show requesting their music; their cue (ie, When should the music start?); if they have any set-up; if their act is messy or requires special cleanup; if they need a microphone or special lighting (if available); and often the name of any plus-one for the guest list. Replying “Here’s my song! See you Thursday xoxo” with music attached is not enough - you’re being asked these questions for a reason, and that reason is to make the show run smoothly and to give you the support that your act needs. Read the whole email, answer all the questions and provide all the required information. Even if your act has no music, no setup, no cleanup, no microphone, and you don’t have a plus-one, please say so – that way the producer knows you’ve actually read the whole email. If you don’t reply “Yes, I need a microphone” or “My setup takes 35 minutes and requires a crane and a team of elephants” then don’t expect to get to the venue on the night of the show and have a microphone or pachyderm parking waiting.

Bluntly put: if a producer asks for your music and stage information by a certain date, send her the music and all of your information by that date. Do not make her chase you down, check in, text you, call you or harass you for it. You are a professional, this is part of your job, so do your job.

“Oops, I forgot to send my music! My bad! I’ll bring a CD to the show tonight.” 

The reason so many shows have gone CD-free is partially for the convenience of organizing music ahead of time – but it’s also because very few venues have CD players any more. And most of the time sound ops are running shows off of iPads, iPods or computers … which don’t have CD drives. So that’s usually not an option.

“I have an iPod. Can’t you just switch over to that for my act?” 

Music digitization has been a deitysend to our industry: with a dressing room full of iPods and so much music floating around in the aether, it’s rare that a legitimate mid-show music crisis can’t be solved with a minimum of awkwardness any more. But most venue sound systems (and at least here in NYC “sound system” frequently means “iPad plugged in behind the bar and run by the kitten who’s squatting next to the beer taps or maybe the bartender hits play when he’s not making a Manhattan”) aren’t set up for multiple inputs (“lots of different things plugged in at the same time”); so plugging in your iPod means unplugging the computer that the rest of the music is on. Which often results in frozen screens, truly horrid feedback, automatically-restarted programs, and crazy random shifts in volume – all of which in turn makes the show (and your performance) that much less smooth and professional-looking.

“Okay, I think the song is on my phone, so if the kitten can just hand that to the DJ -"

Stripper, please. That’s just eight kinds of trouble waiting to happen. No.

Let’s talk about file formats.

On average, for every show I produce about 20% of the music I receive is unplayable. This is not a comment on my performers’ taste, but a problem with their file formats. Drag a song onto your desktop right now (or if you have a PC then, I don’t know - go write a punchcard program or run DOS or whatever you have to do to move a file on those horrible machines). Now look at the file name. It will probably have the name of the song, maybe with your own notation (“HarlemNocturne_Nasty”) then a period, then some numbers and letters (.mp3, .m4p, .AIFF).

These little buggers are the key. They tell us what format the song is in, and therefore if it can be sent off as-is or if it first needs to be converted like a heathen in the face of missionary zeal.

Mp3 is your best friend. It can be dropped into iTunes on any computer, burned onto a CD, or played right off a desktop. We like mp3’s – no, we love those bitches. Everything in life should be an mp3.

While not your best friend, m4a is a really solid acquaintance. You’ve known each other for years and you don’t hang out often, but when you do run into each other it’s really nice. M4a files can be played on pretty much any computer and therefore shouldn’t be a problem, though occasionally you’ll run into an older system or program that can’t open them. Not as worry-free as an mp3, but you can reasonably send m4a files and expect them to work fine.

The bitch who ruined your prom is the m4p. These are protected files (Mnemonic! “P” for “Protected!”) and they will not play on anyone else’s computer. If you buy a song off of iTunes, it is most likely an m4p and will not play on anyone else’s computer. Do not send people m4p files as this will cause them to curse you and your progeny in vile and offensive language.  BECAUSE THEY WILL NOT PLAY ON ANYONE ELSE’S COMPUTER. (This is so you can't illegally share purchased music, by the way.)

(Once you get outside of these “m” files, you’re on rocky ground: .AIFF and .WAV files are huge, take up a massive amount of space, and take hours to up- and download; and anything that requires a specific program to open or play can obviously be problematic. Best not to send any of these to people. You can easily convert non-protected files like AIFF’s to mp3’s in iTunes; just look up how-to in the help section.)

So what’s a stripper to do with these protected files – especially when so many of us head over to iTunes when we’re looking for new music? There’s two choices: send the song as an iTunes gift (that’s the legal option) or convert the file to an mp3 (which is illegal and you should never do this).

Sending a track as an iTunes gift basically means you’re buying the song for someone else; you pay for it, and they’re able to play that protected m4p file on their computer. iTunes gives you the option to "Gift This Song" in the pulldown menu right next to the "Buy" button. (Yes, a producer can just buy the song herself, from her own iTunes account, and I have done this on many occasions when I just can’t get people to send me a playable file. And yes, it’s only a dollar. But think how warm and fuzzy my feelings are towards those few performers who have thoughtfully re-purchased the song themselves. Here’s a hint: really warm. And super fuzzy.)

The other illegal option is to illegally convert the file to a sharable mp3, which is illegal. Ahem. If you do have a computer with a CD drive, then the process is thus:

• Go into iTunes and burn the song onto a blank CD.
• Eject the CD, then stick it back into the computer.
• When iTunes asks if you want to import this CD, say yes; the song will be imported as an mp3.
• You’ll now have 2 versions of the song in iTunes, so just make sure the one you send people is actually the mp3 version.
• This is illegal and you should not do this.

If you don’t have a CD drive, then there are various “legal” (their word) m4p conversion sites and softwares on the interwebs … I’ve not used any of them myself yet as I still have a CD burner on my Commodore 64, but that’s what Google was invented for. (Well, that and LOLcats.)

This file-conversion might seem like an epic pain in your shapely ass, and it does take a good few minutes. But you only have to do it once (and then you have a playable file you can send off for other gigs); the producer or DJ who gets six unplayable files from performers for one show has a butt-ton of work to do. Which makes her very cranky.

One other tip: if, like me, you have an email account that whines and stomps its little feet and throws a tantrum when asked to send large attachments, consider free filesharing sites and services like YouSendIt (only the sender – you – needs to have an account) and Dropbox (both the sender and the receiver need accounts for this one). 

Oh and hey - producers, please make sure a file is actually unplayable and you’re not just being dumb before you bitch at a performer; and performers, when a producer says a file is protected, corrupted, or otherwise unplayable, please don’t argue with her. Just work together to make the music play and everyone will win. And, more importantly, everyone will get naked.

Which is really what it’s all about.