You Gotta Have A Gimmick (nb. being crap is not a gimmick)

I went to Dr. Sketchy's with Sarah last night. Dr Sketchy's is this really great fortnightly life-drawing event put on at the Arthouse on Pitt st that features burlesque performers as models. During the course of the evening the models put on a short performance- it's kind of an antidote to typical stuffy drawing classes. You can drink, talk, relax and see boobs, it's pretty great.

Previous visits I've seen a bellydancer who performed a drum solo as well as a hypnotic, contorted tribal dance, and I've seen a nice young chap who drove a nail into his nose and swallowed a really long balloon, blown up, and then popped it with a pin while it was down his oesophagus- it was lovely.

The performers last light both had the pseudonym suffix "the vamp". I don't know a whole lot about the burlesque scene but these ladies were both beautiful and slightly gothic looking, which leads me to assume that vamp refers to a look rather than a style of performance. So anyway, the performance last night from one particular "vamp" was this really awkward strip show. She was doing this Liza Minelli Cabaret thing complete with the black shorts, stockings and hat- straddling a chair. She was miming the words and kicking the air and stuff. It was incredibly lame, and then she started taking her clothes off and everyone kind of wrinkled up their noses. It was particularly awkward because they put us right in the front row. I could have punched her in the knee, if I so chose. She didn't get fully nakey, which was just as well, and she was covered in really bad 1990's tattoos. I felt bad that she was so shit. I have a great deal of respect for anyone who is passionate enough about an art form to want to make a living out of it, but I can't help but feel that if someone wants to be a performer, they should probably have some kind of marketable skill. The thing is, what she was doing looked piss-easy. I could walk up and down a stage, lip-syncing the words to a song that I don't really know that well, and take my shirt off, so seeing someone else do it just as well as I could just kind of makes me sigh.

But the night wasn't all bad. On our way to the toilet Sarah managed to identify a schizophrenic by analysing the way he drew. I asked her how she knew and she told me that his drawings had 'KILL HER!!!!!' scrawled all over them.

Well I'll be jiggered, I said.