Culture Fiend

A Fiendish Conversation with Waxie Moon

In our new Q&A series, we chat with local artists and performers about their craft. Up first: the Rat King from A Burlesque Nutcracker.

Posted by: Allie Oosta on Dec 19, 2011 at 02:00PM 0 Comments

Photo: POC Photo

See this energy, and more, in Land of the Sweets: The Burlesque Nutcracker

Land of the Sweets: The Burlesque Nutcracker isn’t your little sister’s Nutcracker. There’s no little Clara, and come to think of it, no nutcracker. But for the past five years, the racy dance, shake, and jiggle of the sugar plum fairies has packed the Triple Door, where the dancers show a lot of skin, and a lot of skill. It’s one of the few “ballets” that features a man en pointe; and the aerial act—with two angels flipping through a hoop dangling from the ceiling—could compete with anything you’d see at Teatro ZinZanni.

Then there’s Waxie Moon, a self-proclaimed “gender-blending-queer-lady-boylesque-performance-art stripping sensation” who steals the show as the Rat King in a Louis XIV-style wig (a towering mess made of four regular wigs). Moon began performing boylesque in 2006—armed with an MFA in acting from the University of Washington and time spent studying ballet and modern dance at Juilliard. He’s polished and professional, and his nonstop charm demands your attention.

For the first in a new series of “Fiendish Conversations,” we chatted with Waxie about his in-season habits, the making of the Rat King, and the sexiest dancers in the country:

What’s your pre-performance routine?
I usually sleep in because I’ve been performing the night before. I watch something silly like Modern Family. An enormous lunch, shower, and shave. Meditate for five minutes. Seven sun salutations. Walk to the theatre. An hour doing makeup, because I like the elaborate makeup. That’s how I find the character, because the mask helps me find it. Warm up. Throw on my costume. Three deep breaths.

How did you approach this season’s Rat King?
At this point, the Rat King is deeply known to me, because I’ve been this character for a while. I can relax and be spontaneous now. And when I put on that Louis XIV wig, I feel fiery and ridiculous.

What’s the highlight of this year’s performance?
The opening act—the snowstorm. It has a touch of Rockettes, a touch of classic Christmas, as well as bump and grind. Plus, it actually snows.

What is the best performance (local or touring) you’ve seen in the last year?
This group of extraordinary boylesque performers from Chicago called the Stage Door Johnnies. There are three of them. Their sense of humor is awesome. Sexy, sexy, sexy. … They reinvigorate me for this form.

What local artist in your field should we watch for?
Inga Ingenue. I have the pleasure of performing with her in the pop dance trio Dance Belt. She’s also a great solo performer. One of the best burlesque performers in the world right now. My father is in love with her.

If you weren’t a performer, what else would you want to do?
Long pause …There’s nothing else.

How/where do you unwind after a show?
In my apartment, with my cat, Charlie.

What do you think about critics?
I really appreciate thoughtful dialogue about any art form—so as long as it’s thoughtful, I welcome it.

Land of the Sweets: The Burlesque Nutcracker is at the Triple Door thru Dec 24. Tickets are $28–$45. The feature film “Waxie Moon in Fallen Jewel” will make its regional premiere this October at the Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.

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Tags: Burlesque, Christmas 2011, Fiendish Conversation

Life Is a Strip Tease

Why a new biography of Gypsy Rose Lee is just like Gypsy’s act.

Posted by: Eric Scigliano on Jan 01, 2011 at 09:00AM 0 Comments

American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee by Karen Abbott (Random House, $26)

What a ripe subject Gypsy Rose Lee must have seemed—the unsinkable survivor of an itinerant vaudeville childhood and a stage mother from hell, who despite a flat chest and even skimpier stage talents used burlesque as a vehicle and wit and attitude as engines to fashion a kind of stardom unknown before but reprised since. Madonna avant la lettre. Lady Gaga’s spiritual godmother. And, as it happens, Seattle’s most famous daughter.

How little Rose Louise Hovick from West Seattle, the daughter of a Seattle Times ad salesman and a stage mom from hell, transformed herself into Gypsy Rose Lee is a bittersweet Horatio Alger tale for the roaring ’20s, hard-scrabble ’30s, hard-charging ’40s, and sexual pre-revolution ’50s. And though she surfed more than influenced these eras, her career offers a promising lens on them—even when, as here, burlesque was tamed for Hollywood:

Author Karen Abbott strains for sweep and significance. She paints a panorama of vice, gangsterism, high society, and Tammany politics in New York—a Gotham echo of her previous book, Sin in the Second City—and describes so many outlandish vaudeville acts that they run together like a nickelodeon loop. She even builds a third narrative on the Minsky brothers, New York’s colorful burlesque impresarios, though Gypsy only worked about a year for them. The first two narrative recount Gypsy’s life, sort of, in two alternating threads: one, in present tense, from its career-high midpoint, the other, from the beginning, in past. How cinematic.

This elaborate contrivance makes for much scene-setting, some confusion, and little illumination. Abbott stitches and weaves artfully. But her historical material is half-digested and often just distracting—notably the parallel Minsky saga. Is it another would-have-been book shoehorned into this one?

Abbott muddies the essential story even more, the love-hate triangle between Louise/Gypsy, her monstrous mother, and her more gifted (and maltreated) kid sister, the actress June Havoc, who hoed an even harder row to build a distinguished stage and screen career. Perhaps Abbott puffs and gussies up this tale so much because she knows how oft it’s been told—recently in two other sounder but more pedestrian biographies, most famously by the two sisters themselves, and in the hit musical and movie based on Gypsy’s version.

June and Gypsy were mean storytellers, but both were partial and Gypsy at least was scarcely reliable. Abbott lifts reconstructed dialogue wholesale* from these highly partial memoirs, with no sources indicated save in vague endnotes. And with little evident attempt to sift fact and fiction, though she protests much on that point: “Anything that appears in quotation marks, dialogue or otherwise, comes from a book, archival collection, article," etc. You can trust it, it was in a book! She reports hearsay—notably one third-hand tall tale about Mom fatally defenestrating a hotel manager—as fact. She also fails to inspire confidence on subjects I happen to know something about. Young Louise’s traveling menagerie couldn’t have included a “poisonous horned toad”; horned-toad lizards aren’t poisonous. A self-defense plea is not an “alibi,” and if it’s upheld the killing’s not “murder.” Litigants usually seek writs of mandamus, not “stays, writs, mandamuses.” And she skips lightly or entirely over important aspects of Gypsy’s life—her sexuality, her political activism, the talk show that was her happiest achievement.

“When I occasionally slip inside Gypsy’s head, I do so using the most careful consideration of my research,” Abbott’s also avows in her introduction . In fact she persistently presumes to reveal not just Gypsy’s but others’ deepest thoughts and feelings, but never achieves a coherent, consistent portrait of any of them. Her sharpest insights seem borrowed from a 2003 Vanity Fair article by Laura Jacobs, apparently with permission; Abbot thanks Jacobs for sharing her files and notes.

But hollow as American Rose is behind its razzle dazzle, it’s an apt homage to Gypsy Lee Rose in one sense. As one patron said of Gypsy’s act, “It’s more tease than strip.”

Karen Abbott reads from American Rose February 3 at Elliott Bay Books.

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Tags: Burlesque, Elliott Bay Book Co, Books, Gypsy Rose Lee