Sterling Maxwell

Last night I went to see a show hosted by and produced by one of my very best friends from, wow, was it pre-school days?  We were next door neighbors and we grew up together all the way through high school.  As can happen with friends, we dropped out of touch for years and years, hearing about each other only occasionally.

Then, via Facebook we reconnected a few years ago, and hey, we still lived in the same city.  Surely we should get together and have dinner sometime.  We made plans to make plans that never got planned.  Years went by and we still hadn't seen each other.  She posts on Facebook often and I noticed she was emceeing and producing a show last night from seven to nine.  Hey, I can stay up that late (I think) and I'd love to see a variety show.

So I called my friend who I thought would be interested and coordinated some child care assistance from my parents and Uncle Jonathan and I went off to one of the most popular gay bars in town for what was sure to be a great night.

We didn't really know what to expect but for the five dollar cover charge we got quite a show.  There were probably less than sixty people in the audience in the small side theater but the group made up for it in enthusiasm. My friend, who donned her alter ego as Mister Sterling Maxwell, emceed the show and kept it lively and bawdy.  The acts were not done by hardened professionals, but by people who seemed to love what they were doing.

That doesn't mean they weren't good; I enjoyed each performer.  But a middle-aged burlesque dancer has to have both a love for what she's doing and the appreciative support of the audience to do the kind of show we saw last night.  This particular performer came up later to do a second act and spoke before she started.  She said this was awkward for her because she normally just comes onstage and takes her clothes off.  But, six months ago she and her husband split up...and the audience all said, "aww" in sadness.  But, she said, she and her husband got back together and this was for him.  We all "ahhhed" and she began to dance and take off clothes.  At the end of the dance she gestured to the back of the room for someone to come up and lo, her husband came to the base of the stage and they kissed.  It was very heartwarming. 

There was a significantly overweight woman who danced and stripped down to undergarments.  She was very overweight, but in a shapely way.  And...she danced to a Doctor Who song.  It must have been a nerdy audience because we all loved it and cheered her on.  The next performer, a comedienne, complained that it was nigh-impossible to follow someone stripping to Doctor Who.  And I can tell you as a huge Doctor Who fan myself, I had to agree with her.

The whole evening was such a fun time.  After each act someone came around with a tip jar.  I had done the calculations and I knew these people weren't here for the cover charge income because with the performer to audience ratio, they might well make only twenty dollars that night.  But they were out there and they were doing what they loved.  I tipped them all.

When we left, Uncle Jonathan and I talked about how the show was so positive.  How the audience and other performers and staff were all happy to be there and were happily supportive of whatever the performers decided to show us that night, no matter if it be something silly, doing a lip sync, or  talking about a recent experience or just practicing questionable new jokes.

You don't find that kind of positivity on the internet we discussed.  Everyone is busily being anonymously negative about this product or that "stupid person" or the latest news items.  I want to go back to more shows, because the entire night was both an entertaining and uplifting experience.

And...I need to see my childhood friend and catch up more.  I have missed her!

The Big Boy Update:  Abscess mess.  Okay, he's going to have to have this abscess lanced because although it's draining, it's refilling which means it's not getting emptied completely.  We don't know if it's related to what I had, and yes, if I gave my son an infection I feel awful.  However, the surgeon says he thinks this is MRSA because of how it's behaving and both times I had abscesses the culture came back as not MRSA.  Either way, tomorrow we'll have it addressed in the morning and he's on antibiotics now for MRSA and we'll confirm for sure with the culture results. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Sippy cup up.  She has figured out how to tip up a sippy cup to get juice out of it.  For the longest time this simply eluded her.  It was such a conundrum that we got straw-based cups so she could manage to get in some liquids.

Someone Once Said: Extreme individuals (all of us) don’t take kindly to discipline because they rarely understand the nature of the function.