Strange Days Afoot...

[Little Miss Risk]

St. Patrick was best known for driving the Pagans (and snakes which in some odd way were tangled up with those crazy Irish Pagans) out of the Emerald Isles. It was partly for this reason that people in North America commemorate him, but mostly because it gives people everywhere a chance to drink copious amounts of green beer and deposit green vomit slicks onto city sidewalks everywhere, as far as I can gather. Our St. Patrick's Day had seen us in Medford, Oregon, at Johnny B's. Even your ultra-acerbic narrator found herself hoisting up her whiskey glass to be refilled time and time again which resulted in a few drunken (and I'll wager incoherent) text messages to people afar and at least one cryptic note to myself in lipstick on a bar napkin. Our show over and done with, we peeled the people who had over-indulged off the side of the trailer and headed over towards Boise.

We arrived ridiculously early and found ourselves with time on our hands. We had driven through the night straight through Oregon onto Idaho and JT had swerved to avoid running over some deer, though he came close to getting hit when a particularly enthusiastic tug on the wheel nearly resulted in displacing me from my top bunk on the Murderbus. We rolled into town in the early afternoon and all decamped to look for a refreshing cup of coffee. After I had exhausted my Napoleon Dynamite and Slipknot jokes - of which I have precious few - at the local record exchange, we all drifted back and forth between the streets, taking in the sights of Boise until it was time to load in.

It was sometime between the end of the band's sound check and the start of the show when the staff at Neurolux informed us that Boise had recently passed a new law aimed at smothering the perceived smut at strip clubs. Dancers now had to wear doilies under their thongs, effectively making them into bastardized booty shorts, and could not show under or side boob.

To the uninitiated, underboob is the swell of the breast from the under and side view. Kind of like a lop-sided smiley face to conventional cleavage. So we were told that if local lawmen came in, we burlesque girls were to play a "Boston-style" show. It never really came to that, since everyone, the law included it seemed, had partied their faces off the night before for St. Patrick's Day and as a result our show was a quiet one with it being early, with the crowd only arriving after the last quarter of our set.

This got me to thinking what an odd and disturbing trend we've been seeing in various states. Because in the United States the laws can vary greatly from state to state we start playing the game of What Act Will Possibly Get Us In Hot Water. It's the same reason people will cross state lines to buy margarine, cigarettes and fireworks.

We found in Washington they have an interesting new law. According to Washington State case law, any performers or DJs contracted to provide a service in liquor establishments are considered employees of the establishment and are therefore prohibited from consuming alcohol while performing that service either on stage or in a DJ booth. It seemed so odd to ban performers from drinking backstage, onstage, and had me wondering why they let us drink at all.

Likewise, Boise shares the underboob ban with, get this, Las Vegas. A city where it is easier to buy liquor than water, you can get a hooker in under 30 seconds, and is nicknamed "Sin City" and a female performer can't show a little side boob. This caused a bit of havoc last year at the Miss Exotic World pageant with the burlesque performers competing for the title (but did not stop Angie Pontani from taking the crown). Not only that, but I'm not sure if the "all nude revues" need to have pasties for underboob but the nipples don't need to be covered up in order to stay within the letter of the law. I may be going to some shows in the name of "research" when I'm in town.

In Salt Lake City you can't even perform burlesque (of be a stripper, because apparently in Utah the two things are one in the same, but don't get me started down that road) without a "dancer licence". I'm going to go out on a limb here, but I'm pretty sure you don't need a dancer's licence if your in a ballet company or the latest production of Cats. I'm not able to quite get my head around that one.

This all smacks of the Morality Squad that they had for the motion pictures in the 30's when they brought the rating system in. As far as I can gather is that all the studio heads paid off the necessary people, fingers were pointed at those actors and actresses who were rumoured to have indecent parties, drug problems and were accused "reds" during the Cold War and thrown to the dogs to distract from what was going on.

I smell something kind of rotten not in the state of Denmark but in Washington, Idaho, Nevada and Utah....

[Delyssia LaBelle {Madam}]

no worries , things like that wont last long. at least in less places. ridiculous laws. laws should serve to protect our rights and saftey, not morality, because not everyone has the same view. if you dont want to see a stripper or burlesque dancer dont go to the show. right?