Your Weekend in Analogies
I
Last night, we saw Shannon Wright.
This afternoon, I saw a flamenco dancer on t.v.
A flamenco dancer isn't just a well, dancer—but a full-bodied visceral expression, right?.
Well, that's Shannon Wright. A singer/songwriter who is not. Just. That. Onstage, she writhes snakelike and contorts her face and voice into expressions of pure passion and anguish.
So she’s a flamenco dancer with a guitar. Also a piano.
This is why just listening to Spanish flamenco or Shannon Wright’s music on your stereo just isn’t what it’s about, there, folks.
In case you were wondering about either.
I like analogies. They're among my favorite things, right up there with dark chocolate.
II
So, now think: the group changing room at Loe*hmann's.
That drab orange-and-brown room with mirrors on the walls.
You’re there with your Aunt Sydney, right? She’s trying clothes on her 53-year-old frame. You always sorta admired her, because she was buxom whereas clothes just always kind of hung on you, right?
And there are nine or ten other completely average women there, too.
Now, let’s say what you’re trying on is actually a sparkly silver bustier – and hey, look! Your aunt is trying on a vinyl nurse’s uniform! And that woman over there, the one who looks like your best-friend’s mom? She’s lolling around the dressing-room in a tangerine g-string! She looks bored.
It’s neither particularly titillating nor particularly disturbing.
And you find yourself wanting a P.B.R., because this is not actually Loe*hmanns of course, but a strip-club.
A very well-known Atlanta lounge known as The Clermont. Where I went for the very first time on Friday, for m’friend’s birthday.
The Clermont is a dive. And it has a rep as an incredibly sleazy place with ugly, old strippers. Now though, it garnered a new rep as The Place for Slumming.
It does have old strippers, but here’s the low-down: they’re not grotesque. Just freakin’ normal older women who aren’t all plastic-surgeried to hell.
I guess the basic depressing aspect of any strip club is the idea of women making themselves sexual objects for others, to make money. And that can be taken in different directions, depending on the actual physicality of the women’s bodies, especially as compared to the men they’re leaning all over.
On Friday, as Blondie swatted her aging breasts in some Buckhead guy’s face, you knew there were two dialogues:
1. Buckhead guy + friends: God, this chick’s nasty!
Buckhead girl #1 (making out with boyfriend across table): I sure am prettier than her!
2. Stripper: Time stops for no man! In not so many years you too, will look like me, girlie, and ain’t nothing you can do about it. Twenty bucks, please.
I
Last night, we saw Shannon Wright.
This afternoon, I saw a flamenco dancer on t.v.
A flamenco dancer isn't just a well, dancer—but a full-bodied visceral expression, right?.
Well, that's Shannon Wright. A singer/songwriter who is not. Just. That. Onstage, she writhes snakelike and contorts her face and voice into expressions of pure passion and anguish.
So she’s a flamenco dancer with a guitar. Also a piano.
This is why just listening to Spanish flamenco or Shannon Wright’s music on your stereo just isn’t what it’s about, there, folks.
In case you were wondering about either.
I like analogies. They're among my favorite things, right up there with dark chocolate.
II
So, now think: the group changing room at Loe*hmann's.
That drab orange-and-brown room with mirrors on the walls.
You’re there with your Aunt Sydney, right? She’s trying clothes on her 53-year-old frame. You always sorta admired her, because she was buxom whereas clothes just always kind of hung on you, right?
And there are nine or ten other completely average women there, too.
Now, let’s say what you’re trying on is actually a sparkly silver bustier – and hey, look! Your aunt is trying on a vinyl nurse’s uniform! And that woman over there, the one who looks like your best-friend’s mom? She’s lolling around the dressing-room in a tangerine g-string! She looks bored.
It’s neither particularly titillating nor particularly disturbing.
And you find yourself wanting a P.B.R., because this is not actually Loe*hmanns of course, but a strip-club.
A very well-known Atlanta lounge known as The Clermont. Where I went for the very first time on Friday, for m’friend’s birthday.
The Clermont is a dive. And it has a rep as an incredibly sleazy place with ugly, old strippers. Now though, it garnered a new rep as The Place for Slumming.
It does have old strippers, but here’s the low-down: they’re not grotesque. Just freakin’ normal older women who aren’t all plastic-surgeried to hell.
I guess the basic depressing aspect of any strip club is the idea of women making themselves sexual objects for others, to make money. And that can be taken in different directions, depending on the actual physicality of the women’s bodies, especially as compared to the men they’re leaning all over.
On Friday, as Blondie swatted her aging breasts in some Buckhead guy’s face, you knew there were two dialogues:
1. Buckhead guy + friends: God, this chick’s nasty!
Buckhead girl #1 (making out with boyfriend across table): I sure am prettier than her!
2. Stripper: Time stops for no man! In not so many years you too, will look like me, girlie, and ain’t nothing you can do about it. Twenty bucks, please.
posted by Alice at 6:42 PM
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