Fem Appeal

The Slipper Room, Lower East Side

The pandemic hits and then suddenly it's okay, guys, we have to try new things because the venues are closed and social distancing, blah, blah, blah. Okay, virtual. We're going to be virtual digital performers. And I'm like, What does that mean? Oh, I go back to doing everything myself. So early on in the pandemic, when I was asked to do shows, I was like, I'm not feeling this.

I'm not feeling creative. I'm not feeling good. The world is burning, literally. And then I started easing up a bit because people that I really admired and cared about were like, “We're going to do this, and it doesn't have to live the way it was before. So if you just want to do some like piece that's about what's happening in your world right now, do it.”

And so one of the things I did, I have a Michael Myers act, Michael Myers from Halloween. I thought it was really funny because I was ordering a lot of seamless. So I thought, wouldn't it be funny if I waited for my seamless order as Michael Myers in this new neighborhood of mine, which is really like little suburbia.

So I go out and it's a beautiful day and I record myself dressed up, wearing the mask, holding a giant fake knife. And I don't say anything, but I'm just recording myself. It's windy, I'm looking around, I'm panning the street. One car goes by and then I go, dejected back up the stairs in the house, and I do this thing where I'm wearing a mask, but I put on another mask and then I had gloves on.

So I'm doing the hand sanitizer and that was the whole bit. And when I explained what the premise was, I said, “If you're a serial killer during a pandemic and there's social distancing, what do you do? Nobody's out. You can't really do all the killing you'd like to do. So you go out, you try to get your food and just go back inside.” and that was my piece.

I've been doing burlesque since 2005. I was going through a divorce. I lived in the East Village. I was part of this group called the Fucking Cool Women Society, and it was just a group of mostly creative women who wanted to meet, eat and talk about whatever. So one time I was going through the divorce, I mentioned that and someone said We should do something fun to distract you so you don't have to worry about this.

It's this summer. Let's take a class, Let's dance. Let's do something. And someone found an ad in the Village Voice, the back pages. It was Joe Boobs World in Bala school, and I won. And then in 2006, I was still living in the East Village and the owner of my favorite bar bar on a beau asked me if I could put together a show on Sundays.

And it was called Kitty Nights and I produced Kitty nights every Sunday for eight years. Five months, 29 days.