Last night I went to the Knitting Factory again, to see Peaches. Damn she was hot.
As we walked in, a fellow invited us to go downstairs to enjoy all the free goodies being offered that evening by Camel. They were having some kind of big smoking shindig there. I guess they’re blowing all the promotional cash they can before the smoking ban goes into effect, which I think is this July. I wonder how that’s gonna play out. One thing about the New York kids, they love to smoke. Somehow I’m not impressed.
We went to the ticket booth and got our comp tickets, thanks to Kevin’s string-pulling. He lives a couple doors down and I guess he knows the management.
As we headed into the back room, a saxxy woman in leather and fishnets was performing some interesting acrobatics on stage, bending and flipping and balancing and posing and smiling. Behind her on stage the Camel logo was projected in blown-out type, like you might see in a silent film, but at the bottom of the projection was a crystal-clear surgeon general’s warning. After a few more acrobatics, she popped the top off a beer bottle with a machete, with a bit of unneeded flourish, and took a big gulp. Then she laid down and put a cinder block on her stomach, and an even saxxier woman in leather and fishnets came out and broke said cinder block with a sledgehammer. All good fun. Then the saxxier woman reminded us that Camel was providing all kinds of free goodies downstairs, henna tattoos and liquid latex paint.
Then a band called Elefant came out and sucked.
Finally, after some more messages from Camel, Peaches came out and rocked. Her show would be difficult to describe and still do it justice. She looks like a cross between Julia-Louis Dreyfuss and Sandra Bernhardt, but mostly she acts like Sandra Bernhardt. Very energetic, semi-angry, sex-positive rap to eighties-esque music coming from somewhere offstage. Dressing in a pink leather vest and a pink leather skirt over pink fishnets and often-visible pink underwear, she climbed across the balcony, causing the whole audience to turn slowly around as she circled behind us, kicking a beer over on one of us, that one of us being me. Then she returned to the stage in different clothes and proceeded to have a (staged but sufficiently convincing) menstrual accident on stage. Rubbing her crotching mock ignorance, she finally looked at her hand in mock shock and then ran off stage in mock horror. A few mock-awkward moments passed as the audience played along, and the saxxy emcee lady came out and asked for a tampon, garnering only a beer bottle. After a few funny moments of listening to them try to insert the beer bottle backstage, Peaches emerged in a hotpants and a tight semi-translucent titty-shirt and the beats kicked up again. Someone handed forward an actual tampon, and she stood behind a strobe light and proceeded to stuff it in her pants. Then she did the rest of the show with a tampon string hanging out of her crotch.