kiorama.

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2012-11-30 - 6:39 p.m.

I want to tell you about this because you don't already know. I am glad about this- it's refreshing. Most people I know already know a lot more about this than I do, in a way, and that's what makes things feel weird. It's good to kind of step outside, well, everything. It will take a pretty big step.

I have to start this far back- in 2003 I was twenty-four and worked at feminist sex-toy mecca (then called) Toys in Babeland. Let's start a burlesque troupe, suggested a coworker I wanted to impress, and I immediately said yes (I'd also wished for this to happen in this very diaryland diary thing), though at the time my entire knowledge of burlesque was limited to a 2001 Village Voice article and a small fixation with Dita Von Teese.
ANYWAY! September 15, 2003 was my first show, and the vast, twistyturny New York City Burlesque Community is where I have figuratively lived (despite two long hiatuses, during which I lived upstate) ever since. Yes, even when I'm not performing much, or participating in festivals, or going to Exotic World (still never gone, actually) or even really super-socializing with its members (/various assorted "adjacent" members), the scene is The Scene, and there it is, invisibly but tangibly blanketing the city in glitter, industrial adhesive, well whiskey, and unwashed g-strings. And art and business and occasionally, as you can imagine, dramas large and small. A fair amount of partner-swapping (like in a larger sense than in a sex way) has occurred, especially in the past three years or so. Everybody knows EVERYBODY, and this is like maybe two or three hundred people (though I don't know for sure. There should be a census). As with any community, it feels like a family. Sometimes distant, sometimes dysfunctional. Typically incestuous. Always matriarchal.
More. Later.

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