It's really beautiful outside today, and it will be a crime if I don't go out for a walk. It was nice out yesterday too, and I should have gone for a stroll, but other than picking up my laundry from the wash-and-fold, I stayed in. Still, in all fairness to myself, I had completed a big load of work in four and a half days with crackerjack efficiency, and I was pretty tired. I'm now basically two weeks ahead of my deadlines, so I'll be able to visit my kid sister Jenny in Chicago without worrying about work. She recently started cancer treatments, and I want to see her and lend a hand however I can. I'll be in the Midwest for ten days starting next weekend.

I plan to continue blogging while I'm gone, however, and I hope to on a daily basis.

I felt like seeing more neo-burlesque last night, and there was a show on the Lower East Side but I felt too tired to get on the subway and go all the way downtown for it. Instead I slipped my Something Weird DVD of Hollywood Burlesque in the recorder and watched the show in its entirety for the first time. It's about sixty-seven minutes long, and is basically the filming of a complete San Diego burlesque revue from 1948. It's enjoyable both as entertainment and as an historical record. It's shot from different perspectives so you get to see the show both from back in the orchestra and closer up near the runways.

The dancing and choreography is a little muddled sometimes, and the singing of the tenors may not exactly be top drawer as they accompany the chorus girls, but the dancers are all lively and pretty and the music is catchy. The comic bits are a mixed bag--the baggy pants jokers in this DVD are not as strong as others I've seen, as in Something Weird's Best of Burlesque DVD which had top guys like Little Jack Little and Beetlepuss Lewis, but there's still something enjoyable about the gags even when they fall flat. There's one absurd sketch that has three dancers (dressed) imitating bees with honey in their mouths (it's actually water), which they then spit on the goofy male comic. And there's a funny skit involved two guys dividing up forty dollars.

The featured peelers in Hollywood Burlesque are quite good. There's brunette Marie, and Amazonian Bobbi Roberts, and sultry dirty blonde Jenne, and platinum blonde headliner Hillary Dawn--but my favorite was Joy Damon, with her mane of auburn hair and a killer body that she could really move. She obviously seemed to enjoy dancing around the stage, at least judging by her sexy and flirtatious smile and athletic energy. The power of a smile is so great to me that I find it hard to believe that if this Joy Damon is alive, she isn't still in her mid-twenties and jumping around, rather than her eighties and probably moving quite a bit slower. A great smile makes people seem immortal to me...

Anyway, there was also a man-and-woman dance team which did a couple of numbers. What made one of the couple's numbers unique was how the woman stripped off bits of her costume and handed them to the man onstage, who then danced behind the curtain to put them aside. Usually the person who "catches" the stripper's clothes is offstage.

Another thing that was unique about Hollywood Burlesque was how after the dancers stripped down to their pasties, their concluding move was to go behind the curtain, remove the pasties, and then pop out for a few seconds to reveal their bare breasts to the audience. In most of the vintage burlesque movies I've seen, the dancers usually wear some of form of pasty on their nipples throughout.

There's another movie on the same DVD called Peek-A-Boo which has an early appearance by my fave Patti Waggin, only billed as Patti, but I believe I already discussed Peek-A-Boo in a previous entry. Anyway, if you're interested in learning more about this disc, I've included a link to the Something Weird Video website so you can see the boxcover and read more about what's on the DVD. I don't work for Something Weird; I just like to make it easy for you to share my enthusiasm if you're so inclined! It looks as if the video is currently out of stock, but I'm sure they'll get it back in.

HollywoodBurlesque