Journal

I was fortunate to be welcomed to perform on my short visit to New Mexico this past week by both Burque Burlesque and Burlesque Noir.  Friday night I performed my classic rhinestone piece with Burque Burlesque to Ella Fitzgerald’s “Keep My Love Alive” – our 1/2 hour burlesque show opened for some radical rockabilly bands, like Three Bad Jacks.  I got to swing dance with a talented boy after and I wonder where the rockabilly scene is in LA.  There must be one with all these millions and millions of folk, but I’ve never seen it.  I’d like to!

Saturday night Burlesque Noir produced a full 3 hour burlesque extravaganza.  There were award-winning group burlesque acts, a magician and special guest dance solos.  The Lone Ranger film is shooting in New Mexico right now and I own a company working on it, so I had been hanging out on set saying hi to friends all week and many of the Lone Ranger crew came to see the show, as well as some of the Lone Ranger stars, Tom Wilkinson and Ruth Wilson!  But what delighted me the most was getting one of the Lone Ranger crew (and a handsome hunk of a Lover) on stage as the target for my Bullwhip Burlesque.

Here are some photos from my Bullwhip Burlesque with Burlesque Noir Saturday 5/26/12.  As always, the pasties pics are not public – you have to come see me live for that!  All photography by Dark Flash Photos.

Welcome, sunshine! It’s spring and I’ve got all the windows wide open in my Hollywood apartment. The wind blows in, sometimes even birds fly in—and the tomato seeds in a pot in my dining room burst up through the soil as the room itself warms like a greenhouse. Sunshine lifts our spirits, gives light allowing vision and aids our bodies in producing necessary vitamins. In fact, I am convinced that I am half plant/half animal like the recently discovered green sea slug, and that maybe I am photosynthetic by nature, too. Maybe not. But no matter how one looks at it, sunshine is a giver of life and deserving of all the gratitude and respect we humans can give. So with all these life-sustaining accolades, why does sunshine elicit such a bad health rap?

According to the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (NCCDPH):

“Skin cancer is the most common type of cancer in the United States. Since 1973, new cases of the most serious form of skin cancer, melanoma, have increased approximately 150%. During the same period, deaths from melanoma have increased approximately 44%. Approximately 65%-90% of melanomas are caused by ultraviolet (UV) radiation.”

The sun is the source of two types of UV radiation: UVB and UVA rays. It turns out that UVB rays, because they are the rays that cause tanning, were also thought to cause skin cancer. So previous incarnations of sunscreen were developed to block UVB rays. Yet skin cancer rates skyrocketed (dark-skinned readers please pay attention, too!), so scientists were forced to consider that the cause of a tan may not be the cause of melanoma skin cancer—which is, of course, what we are all trying to avoid when running to the market with greasy SPF30 goo in our crosshairs.

The Skin Cancer Foundation recommends only five ingredients known to successfully block UVA rays: avobenzone, mexoryl, octocrylene, titanium dioxide and zinc oxide. So check your goo selection for one of these before purchase. Unfortunately, although these chemicals are proven to block cancer-causing UVA rays, they themselves may cause toxicity that is more harmful than the radiation they are blocking.

Octocrylene, for example, is a powerful free-radical generator that, get this, initiates a reaction that can lead to melanoma when activated by ultraviolet light, like that from the sun. Titanium dioxide is known to cause DNA damage to human cells and is a suspected carcinogen. Zinc oxide is generally recognized as safe by the FDA as a food additive; however, inhaling zinc oxide fumes can result in a nervous disorder known as metal fume fever, which brings up the social responsibility of our purchases. Someone’s mother is working in the factory that mixes our sunscreen concoctions. If manufactured in China, someone’s 12-year-old son might be working in that facility. By protecting ourselves, we may be harming another.

Since, according to the NCCDPH, “More than one half of a person’s lifetime UV exposure occurs during childhood and adolescence because of more opportunities and time for exposure,” it is vital that parents assist their children in regulating their sun exposure. Zinc oxide is the only sunblock approved for use with children under six months of age. However, zinc oxide leaves a greasy white residue on the wearer’s skin.

Worse, the Green Guide product report tells us that:

“In order to render transparent sunblocks containing titanium dioxide and zinc oxide, many manufacturers are using ‘micronized’ ingredients or ‘nanoparticles,’ that is titanium dioxide and zinc oxide particles that have been fragmented to sizes below 100 nanometers (a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter long). Some research indicates that titanium dioxide, particularly if it enters the body through cuts or inhalation, can cause more damage to DNA than larger particles of titanium dioxide, as noted in the November 1996 Toxicology Letters.”

Even after learning about the potential dangers of some of the active ingredients in sunscreen, you may have settled on one you feel comfortable putting on your and your child’s skin this summer. But before you rush out to the drugstore, you should also consider the safety of the inactive ingredients in sunscreen, which I will discuss next week.

It is a banana. It’s not a banana. It is a banana. It’s not a banana.

Warning to all my fellow raw fooders: tropical travel with ruin you forever. For after three weeks on the remote island of Dominica, only 26 miles long / 15 miles wide, I sit here now, in springtime Lincoln Park Chicago, trying to convince myself the thick-skinned-no-seed-having yellow piece of food I just paid $1 for at the coffee shoppe is indeed a banana.

It’s not a banana.

The last my taste buds remember, a banana was small, sometimes bite-sized fruit, ripe only when fully brown and soft as jelly, erupting with multi-dimensional flavors – sometimes aromatically figish, sometimes undeniably hibiscus. But this…this fruit I am eating now I think is some kind of artifcial syrup pressed into an elongated phallic shape, created in a laboratory to match the taste of Runts candy – America’s accepted standard for fruit taste. I am ruined forever.

How can I forget the farmer’s market in Roseau (with a population of 10,000, Dominica’s biggest village): I asked to taste a mango, ended up eating the entire thing, and when negotiating price for her goods, the vendor charged exactly what the earth had charged her that morning. This happened repeatadly, this gifting of fruits – handfuls of yellow island “cherries” or bundles of sugar cane stuffed in my hands. Tell me now, with generosity like this, what health food salad bar can compare in nourishment?

Or what about the roadsides, practically polluted with jelly coconuts: so available are these bowling ball sized treats, the locals commonly carry machetes for impromptu hydration breaks. So abundant are these delicious rocks in the sky, the Pirates of the Caribbean ll & lll movie hired an official coconut cutter to protect the unaware noggins of cast and crew. And so fresh and clean was the green coconut’s tonic water, I fear I may never be able to stomach the over sweet and pesticide dipped Thai atrocity again.

If that wasn’t enough, this equatorial paradise spoiled my palate with an array of exotic new fruits, picked right from the tree myself. Count on two hands: the consciousness altering fresh cacao pod, the feathery vanilla-like cass pod meat, the cinnimon/date flavored chapotilla, the similar-textured brown-golfball-sized tambrine fruit, and the luscious mango/pumpkin flavored mame apple (known to the locals also as “apricot”). But even the more common fruit fare in States is reduced to factory flavors when compared to Dominica’s in-season watermelon and powerful pineapple. Still, by far, nothing lifted the proverbial produce veil from my eyes nor had a deeper affect on my total being than one oddly shaped, smallish spiked, iguana green fruit blob, eaten soft as a mother’s breast, with pulp the color of dawn…with a texture stringy and almost transparent and as softly sweetened as heaven’s iced tea…these statements might not be FDA evaluated, nor the potency of said effects legally regulated, but my personal research confirms in repeated double-blind studies, the strange sour sap is officially a dangerous aphrodisiac.

How can one go back to limp raspberries in a plastic container after that?

So I beg you, raw fooders and produce lovers alike, give up your gardens, abandon the farmer’s markets and stay as far away from the southern Caribbean as possible. Leave the life of wandering and compulsive perpetual travel to those of us who have already bitten Eden’s apple, dooming ourselves to a destiny of dining dissatisfaction and fatal fruit snobbery.

So until I can return to the volcanic coasts of some tropical jungle, eating precisely the way climate, season and location dictate, I shall somehow try to relish a bag of baby carrots. But as far as bananas go, this spirit is unbroken, and Dole, and their new “organic line” can kiss my Dominican pawpaw!

Desert road trip. I’ve got the costumes and soundtrack selected. I’ve got the whip and rhinestones ready. I’ve got a map with x’s and a rock and roll fantasy.

If I had a classic hot rod … if I had someone else’s dog I stole. If I had an extra two thousand bucks from undisclosed means, it would be easier to get swept away. In the dust devil on the horizon.

I like to go. I like to go. I like to drive. I like the getting there. I am a roadtripper. Two days, five days, ten days – what’s there to see?  If I’ve never done it before, that’s what I want to do.

In Albuquerque I’m headed to meet the real renegades of the state. The women who dress up just to take it off. The men who fight for a living. I’m the naked fighter sharing a thought that gets us somewhere – like back on the road. With my voice raised and the windows down. Eyes scratchy and squinting, for the desert wind, so dusty hot dry. Throwing sweaty clothing into the backseat. Ready to fight and fly.

Dance on camera!  Burlesque for film.  I’m starting to get the hang of this Final Cut Pro X editing software!  This is my third project and I’ve learned a few tricks since my last edit.  If you check out the previous project I edited, you’ll see how learning FCPX really helps me convey my burlesque dances more the way they feel while I”m performing them.  That and the footage for this piece was shot by Marti Matulis and it exceptionally better than that antiquated phone cam footage I had before.  Plus I got two camera angles in on this one – oooooh, now my dance is starting to look like it feels!  So much respect for the people who edit stunts and sports.  More respect for the chosen few who get to edit dance.  Not just movement sync but movement sync to music with emotion conveyed.  I hope my editing frees up some of my performances creative expression.  I’m so excited about seeing burlesque on camera.  Please enjoy my Machine Shop Grinder Girl Burlesque solo: