Only in San Francisco

A while ago, a friend dragged me off on a Friday night, out to the burbs, to see a show that had San Francisco plastered all over it. It was the Peaches Christ "Midnight Mass", an alternative religious festival to coincide (fortuitously) with the Christian festival of Easter.

Who is Peaches Christ? She is a transvestite cabaret performer, a consummate entertainer. She is her own institution, a dynamo of sneering attitude and arch campness. She is a large woman, with, obviously, the frame of a man, and with a huge hairdo, and thick garish makeup, she was more god than human. She owned the stage. In the show that I saw, she entered the stage but bursting out of volcano, complete with flames and crumbling plaster.

Every year, Peaches Christ puts on a number of movies that score through the roof on the camp scale. As the movies are shown at midnight and involve a pre-movie cabaret show, the cinema which hosts the event is waaay out in the outer Richmond, and we had to get there by taxi (taxis in San Francisco are not all like taxis in nyc, they are expensive and infrequent).

That night's show was based on scenes from Showgirls and also involved a free lap-dance at the end of the cabaret act (more on the lap-dance). The cabaret show took crucial scenes from the movie - in this case, it was the masterful dialogue from screen-wright Joe "My adolescent sex-fantasy" Ezterzas - and took the scenes to their logical conclusion. The one that stuck in my mind was where the feuding show-girls were reminiscing about their childhoods where one of the girls admitted that she was once so poor that she had to eat dog-food. "You too," squealed the other show-girl, as they shared their stories about their favourite dog-food. Peaches Christ and friend then replayed the scene which ended up with the two of them eating dog-food on stage and then fisting each other under strobe lights. You get the idea.

At the end of the cabaret set, we were treated to the real draw-card of the show, the free lap-dance for everyone who had a box of pop-corn. Shamefully, I have to admit that I had to hide my box of pop-corn, because the thought of getting a lap-dance from a heavy set bearded transvestite was somewhat unsettling. Call me a prude if you must. Except it was much much worse. We were first asked to raise our box of pop-corn. About a hundred people raised their pop-corn, there was going to be a lot of lap-dances a coming. Then the lap-dancers were brought up. The first one was what you might imagine, a femmy looking transvestite, that thin sleek androgynous looking tranny in tight tight clothing.

After that, my mind was blown. The other lap-dancers included: an abraham lincoln look-alike in suspenders and pants, a large person in a suit and wearing a bunny head, large bearded men, someone in a green martian suit, some very drunk people in stripped stockings... and so the list went on. And just when you'd seen it all, the very last lap-dancer was introduced, who made everybody in the audience gasp. This lap-dancer was a short stocky woman in a full burkha.