We are simply mad. Just watched the "commercial". I didn't realize it was on last night until the very end of the timeslot--I turned on the TV just as the crowd started cheering and Obama waved goodbye--and was too exhausted to track it down last night on the YouTubes.
I went to bed at 9:40! Didn't even watch the end of the dumb-ass CSI I was watching peripherally whilst text-messaging Special Lady T dorky ASCII picture-texts of roses and hearts.
So I tracked it down this morning, since I woke up at 6, nice and refreshed. Boy, what a great piece--it really makes Obama look presidential. He's such a great speaker.
My Dad said that Obama is my generation's JFK and while I thought he was overstating and being dramatic when he said it, I think he kind of has something there. He's really inspiring and he really spurs people into action. Here's the commercial, in case you didn't see it. (I love that it ends with a message to vote or volunteer, p.s.)
Last night's show was a lot of fun, even though I was in a foul mood for most of the time on account of the poor timing and dismal communication skills of someone I thought was a friend. (But enough of that--drama clogs my pores.)
The Princess Leia act was a good idea. The costume was fantastic and it brought down the house when I stripped off the hair buns wig and clipped on the braid. T said it was a "complete costume change" onstage. Everyone thought it was kind of great and the dude who ran the bar LOVED it. He said he was a Star Wars geek and he just adored it. (And he also commented on how he loved T's costume--she was Han Solo. Fantastic!)
T actually had a funny night. She was wearing her Han costume and when she went out the lobby to go to the bathroom, someone called her "Action Lady". We thought that was really funny and we kept talking about it all night. Like she was a lady action figure. Hilarious.
Man, I had a good time making that costume. I really love sewing and making costumes. Last week, I finally bought myself a sewing machine. This purchase has been three years in the making--I've wanted one since I moved out of El's and I never had the money to purchase one until this last week. (I have been busting my ASS to get out of debt and I thought it was time for a little reward for all of the hard work!)
It is SO NICE to have. I spent my week toiling away on a few projects, trying to get used to the machine: I cut the back of my Princess Leia robe and sewed tearaway snaps into it (messy. Doesn't look so cute, but it did the job); Cut open the back of a gown and sewed a seam to finish it and then put hooks in the back (less messy and I was proud of the seam I made); and sewed darts into a shimmy belt (and added a pretty flower) that was made for me by my bellydancing friend. That was the best project I did. Plus, I blinged the hell out of the Princess Leia Slave Bikini and the "blaster" gun.
Overall, a nice week off--I had a "stay-cation" this week, a breather from work--and hung out most of the week with my old friend Strawberry Shortcake. It was so amazing to hang out with her again--I have missed her terribly over the last few years. There is something about old friends that can just ground you and make you feel so peaceful and whole. I don't have too many friends left from that period of my life--with El--and it's just nice to know that your life is a connected line, not disjointed episodes.
Speaking of which, I think that me and one of my old friends who I had some drama with a year ago might be on the mend. I love and adore her, so it's super nice that we're going to sit down and hash through some stuff. We had a rough time about a year ago and I'm happy to have her back in my life. She is one of those friends who just brings lightness and makes me laugh really hard. I have missed her horribly and I'm glad to be able to work through the drama. These days, I am happy to work through and eliminate the drama.
Onward: I am super-duper-duper excited about the December show I just got booked for yesterday! On the heels of a fresh rejection from another December show, it was PERFECT to get an offer for this one. It made it seem like "everything happens for a reason" and what a reason! Can I just say that it's the kind of thing that I have been waiting to do for most of my burlesque "career"? It's a Christmas Burlesque Ball with a 15,000 sf location, all built out with stages and screens, perfomance in the space as a character throughout the night with a solo act later on, out of town burlesque performers coming to perform in it...It has the makings of something really big. The person who booked me usually delivers on the kind of grandiose scale that they promise, but we'll see how it goes. More as it develops, but I am REALLY psyched about it.
All right. I am going to go research my major idea for the Christmas Ball. No time like the present to begin planning and choreographing.
I have a tracker on this blog, mostly so I can obsessively look at how many people are reading this things and so that I can tell if marketing that I am doing--like my new HTML newsletter that I made today for Ms. Bea's burlesque shows and activities--is working. It's pretty fun to watch the little graph thing go up and down based on what activities I am engaged in.
The latest big fun is that I have been watching what keywords (in Google and Yahoo searches) are driving traffic to the site. This can be pretty interesting, as it provides a glimpse into what people search for and also shows some of the topics that while I maybe didn't write about them as the search intends, they are still pretty interesting.
Here are some of the top terms:
cat jackolanterns, cat jackolantern, jackolantern cat: Last year, one of my best friends, E, made what she called a "Cat-o-Lantern" for Halloween when her and Aunty--her boyfriend--carved pumpkins. Variations on this search has proved a perennial favorite, but has seen a lot of recent action, as Halloween has drawn near.
girls n diapers: I have no idea what people are looking for when they type this into Google, but apparently, my blog has enough mentions of the word "girls" and the word "diapers" (blame it on my ex's kids) to see some action.
coco lopez: What a popular search! I made E's birthday cake with this last spring (which was a huge hit. It was so delicious) and Coco Lopez is a FAVORITE search. Coco Lopez is, of course, the coconut creme in Pina Coladas, not a Latina drag queen, as I once thought.
mean swagger: Poem about a crazy ex. The search term says it all.
helpful hints for spring: I kind of liked this. I wrote about Spring a lot the first year I was blogging.
riot grrrl karaoke: Someone told me about this--that Kathleen Hannah runs something like this in NYC. Sigh. If only we could get it going at the local karaoke joint. I would love to belt out some Sleater-Kinney.
maybe a song I sing when i want: This is, I believe, a lyric from Cracklin' Rose by Neil Diamond. (cough). I kind of love this song--it's one of my secret shames.
helpful hints to a widow with debt: Wow. I'm not quite sure how this happened, but cool. I hope I was helpful to the people looking for this.
bea's own good lessons: Yes, that's what the WHOLE blog is! My good lessons.
superdawg "better off dead": This just made me crave Superdawg. (drool) I wrote about it a few times when I was dating (yet another) crazy ex, BP. We went there a few times--Superdawg being, of course, the fantastic drive-in hot dog place up on the NW side. And Better Off Dead? A fantastic John Cusack movie from the 80's.
birthday cakes made with liquor: E's cake. Again. Delicious.
mozart's-hallelujah: I sang a solo to this several times in my life--once when I was in Church choir at the Unitarian Church, once when I was a kid for a choir concert at school. It is one of my favorite pieces of classical music. The runs in the solo are hard to master and I probably could not still do it today without a lot of practice.
Miss Spam: Someone called me this on the bus once, because I told him I do internet marketing. I liked it.
3 hints and a miss: I like this. I think my next blog will be called "3 Hints and a Miss"
pride-parade: Sigh. I wish it was June again.
Bea's The Boss: Yes. Well stated.
Oh my goodness! I am so super excited about this Princess Leia burlesque act I have created. It's fantastic--I love every bit of the costume and the music. It's one of the cutest things I've ever done and I'm really pleased with the outcome. I can't wait to perform it this weekend.
I will write more later and post again this weekend with photos.
I totally forgot to post the photos from the trip to the north of Michigan, from the T "Family Compound", as we call it. It's really nice--two cabins, no running water, in the woods. We hung out on Saturday at a fancy country club that had delicious bloody marys and then went to the river, so the dog could swim. Amazing. These photos were taken at the country club (36 hours into "no shower" mode! Sorry if we smell...)
Hazel, T's niece, is the most chill and adorable baby EVER. No lie. This kid was the cutest and most mellow baby I've ever met.
Hazel was the only one who got a bath at all.
I shot the obligatory "bath in bath" photos for T, as she was outside playing horseshoes, or perhaps cutting down trees with a chainsaw for firewood with her Dad. I'm not kidding, her family was total salt-of-the-earth Midwestern. Unlike my father, who claims that if "God had meant for us to camp, he never would have invented four star hotels" (hey! he's down to earth...At least the saying wasn't "five-star"!) these folks were cutting down dead trees and chopping firewood and cooking on a tripod-grill that had a level to lower the grill part down to the fire. (That contraption was SO COOL!)
The bath water, by the way, came to the land in a giant jug from their houses in Grand Rapids. It was then heated on the stove in a ginormous cast iron tea kettle and then mixed with cool water and dumped into a plastic bin in the sink. There was a sink, just no faucets or pipes.
Gotta go to bed now...
Mas later.
P.S. Isn't my partner HOT? I think she's totally hot.
I can't wait until the relentless schedule lets up. I've got two shows this week--one at Berlin (jungle burlesque) and my quarterly Girlie-Q. It's amazing to have so much booked, but I'm feeling kind of overwhelmed with all of the working full time-rehearsing and performing at night. It's making me stressy.
(Countdown to the end of super duper busy: 12 days)
Things are great with me and T. She is an amazing woman and I feel so lucky to have met her. After all of the BS of the past two years it seems a small miracle to me that she's in my life.
On Saturday, we went out to my sissy's and hung out with the nieces. It was an amazing and warm day--sunny, hot. We hung out in the backyard with Miss G and Miss J, played a few rounds of board games (including "Pretty Pretty Princess" a game in which you have to get the most jewels. Very appropriate for our consumer culture and for reinforcing gender stereotypes. And a fun game. I like to procure bling.), ate some lunch and went to the non-cute pumpkin farm. (There is a cute one that we went to last year, but it was too much for us to troupe all the way out there.)
T bought two pumpkins for her pumpkin-decorating party and then we drove back to the City. On the way, we went to Michael's (the amazing craft store) and she got some Martha Stewart glitter in some fall colors because she wanted to glitter up two pumpkins as decoration for her house for the party. She said that they turned out great--I was in costume-making zone yesterday.
Then we had a MARATHON of watching Nip/Tuck. Nip/Tuck is the current obsession--we're making our way through the previous six seasons. It's SO GOOD. Delicious and juicy and so great. We sat on the couch for six hours and watched like three DVDs-worth. Then we went to bed and had a GREAT morning on Sunday. What a nice day: fun with the family, crafts, Nip/Tuck, great dinner (T treated us to Thai takeout from Opart by my house! It was delicious and it was a great treat.), good day. All around, great weekend day.
The thing that it keeps bringing up (great days with T) is that I have come so far in just a year. Ten months and we're going strong--it restores my faith in relationships and in my capacity to love. It was such a hard time with the cavalcade of freaks--crazy-making, really--and all of the shit that went down with my ex. I try to not focus on that rough time (and it was an incredibly rough time in my life) and on all of the good that is happening now.
Anyway.
I am super excited for winter. It's going to be a great holiday season--I think we're going back to Michigan for T's family Christmas* this year. And we may spend Thanksgiving with my sister's in-laws...And then there's the trip to Mexico in February with MainGay and the PastryChef and then we're moving in together in March.
OK. I have to go. I'm gonna be late!
*Sidenote: I spent a great weekend at the family "compound" a few weeks back--they have a no-water cabin in the woods in Michigan. It was so relaxing and great to spend a whole weekend with T's fantastic family. They are a warm and wholesome best-example-of-a-Midwestern-family. Just kind and funny and warm and accepting. Everything you'd want from your in-laws
What a couple of weeks. We had a cruh-zay-zay event at work. I worked a lot of hours last week, but everything went really smoothly. It was a summit for people of faith who want to do activism around reforming the criminal justice system. It was great--not as well-attended as we would have hoped, but the event itself was great. (And all of the materials and presentation looked good, so that's that.) I am dragging my ass right now. I don't really want to go into work today. I was debating working from home, but I think with my meeting load that I can't pull it off today. Poo.
In more exciting news, I have six shows lined up for the next month. I'm pretty excited about that. I'm doing a princess leia number (the costume was under construction for 10 hours yesterday. And my new sewing machine's bobbin is confounding. I guess you get what you pay for--It was ten bucks.)
Pause for one day to go to work, teach burlesque class and crash out.
So, yeah. Due to my current hormonal load, I am presently feeling pretty feh. I expect the Blahd any minute now. Last night, when I got home from rehearsal I baked bisquick biscuits, because I was craving something white-flour-and-buttery-and-sweet (with honey!)
Pause to eat leftover biscuits. Yum.
Oh man, those biscuits were good. Anyway, what was I saying? Feeling feh. I was super duper excited about the Princess Leia burlesque idea, but then I noticed that someone else in another City has an act like that and then I felt like an ass about it and now I'm feeling all sad and weird about it. It's really bizarre to me (I say again) that if someone in the world has had the same idea as you that you're not "allowed" to do it in the burlesque world. I'm going to do it anyway, because, again, I don't want to be a national performer, I am doing this for fun (and no profit), and because I loved Princess Leia as a kid and because it's fucking Halloween.
It seems ridiculous to me that I even have to justify an idea that is cute and that I had, on my own, from my own brain, that someone else happened to have at some other time in some other place.
I am also excited about the idea that occurred to me yesterday when I was thinking about doing a post-election something something for the Flesh Hungry Dog Show next month.
I did the show again this past Friday. Fun! Except what was not-so-fun was that I locked my keys in the trunk of my car after the show and had to take a cab to Special Lady T's and ring her bell at 1 am and she was all asleep. Luckily, my car was parked in the city lot of the best hardware store in the City (Clark-Devon Hardware) and a very nice man unlocked my car with his Slim Jim for FREE. I love those people there and I especially love Special Lady T for FORCING me to go BACK into the hardware store to see if they had someone who could do that before calling a locksmith for $100.
But the fun part of the show was doing my Martini Time act and I spilled all of the Cosmo I was making onstage onto the stage before the drink got mixed. And then I poured the vodka into the shaker and poured it into the glass and the host of the show (not knowing it was vodka) poured it on his face briskly--how rock n' roll!--and nearly blinded himself with cranberry Effen. Dude. Hilarious.
Oh, but then I got this GREAT idea yesterday and it involves either a large photo of Obama or a cardboard stand-up of him and the song "You Do Something to Me" in homage to my wee (okay, large) crush on Barack Obama. He's dreamy. Yes, and I like his politics too, except for the gay marriage part, but my boo would AT LEAST let us have domestic partnerships, right?
With that Obama-love, I must leave you darlings. Have a lovely week and chat more soon. Mas later, bitches.
My last description was too lofty. This is just my online journal with some helpful hints thrown in, m'kay?
Who is this woman called Ms. Bea?
JT
Ms. Bea Haven is JT Newman, a Chicago-based burlesque & performance teacher, videomaker, writer, and performance artist. This blog is an attempt to keep a writing practice going.
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