A Lesson in Etiquette

For those who know me personally you'll know that I have many passions in my life and one of those passions is burlesque.  Like so many things in my life it was Kat who introduced me and I went to my first class knowing barely anything about it.  I remember how horrified I was at the moves, the seduction - oh my how I blushed the first time I tied someone to a chair and shimmied my breasts in front of them.  But I quickly grew to love it and the reason I loved it was not just because of the way it makes me feel but because of the way I was introduced to it.  The awesome Ms Deb Delicious was my teacher - a woman so talented just watching her takes my breath away.  Better, she is beautiful of soul as well as of figure and she told us all that we could dance and be beautiful.  I believed her and it turns out she was right.

I am not a woman who has ever really had a lot of girlfriends.  My experience with others of the fairer sex was not positive going through high school and I tend to just get along better with guys in general.  Burlesque was the first time in my life where I landed in a room full of women who I genuinely liked.  No bitchiness, no nastiness, just loads of giggling, compliments and intimacy.  It was bliss.  We start each class by describing a sexy and an unsexy moment we've experienced during the week and boy the things that we talk about!  New boyfriends, new girlfriends, sickness, favourite clothes, bitchiness...the list of sexy and unsexy things is endless and revealing.

Burlesque has not been anything like what I expected from that very first day and it has come to mean a lot to me and to change me in unexpected ways.  You hear what they say about society poisoning our minds about our bodies but until the first moment where you genuinely fall in love with your body and what it can do you don't realise that you've secretly bought into the idea that you ought to look like a barbie doll and resigned yourself to a lifetime of ordinariness.  Burlesque made me wake up to myself.  It made me feel good about myself.  It gave me confidence.  I came to realise that it doesn't matter what shape you are, what colour your hair is or how big your breasts are; someone, somewhere thinks you are the hottest thing since the sun first burst into the sky.  And that hotness is only magnified if you believe in yourself and carry yourself with confidence.  Burlesque is the reason I have moments where I believe I am beautiful and desirable.  It has given me self-confidence beyond any understanding of the word I ever had before I started to dance.

My burlesque school is small and intimate.  None of us look like Playboy models.  None of us are professional dancers.  What we are is a group of smart, animated women who gather to practice our bumps and grinds, make our costumes, giggle and gossip.  For me burlesque is a sacred space.  I go there and share my tragedies and triumphs through my sexy and unsexy moments.  I've cried with these women in some pretty dark moments and they've held me.  I've danced with them and admired everything about their beautiful faces, minds and bodies.  I've loved every damn minute of every class I've ever been to and it's not because I get to take my clothes off and gyrate - it's because these fantastic women love me just as I am and wouldn't have me any other way.

A few weeks ago the girls gave an incredible performance and I was there with Kat to cheer them on.  They were so funny, sexy and brilliant.  I screamed myself hoarse.  It was an incredible, amazing show that left them all high.  I know how much it took for some of them to get up there and do it - reveal themselves, put it out there, dance their hearts out in daring costumes for people they don't even know.  They deserved to be lauded and applauded purely for trying.  The fact that they were so damn good at it was icing on the cake.

Unfortunately not everyone feels the way I do.  Today I found out that some people on Facebook decided to write horrible things about our little group and its performers.

To me, it's water off a duck's back.  Ironically these classes and the beautiful Miss Deb are the reason I care not a jot for these people or anything they have to say.  Nothing can touch the love I have for these women or the confidence I have in myself thanks to them.  But watching poor Miss Deb struggling to hold back her tears while she talked about it today made me powerfully angry.  Generally I think that people who have to say those sorts of things about others do so because of a flaw in their own character.  Insecurity, jealousy, whatever it may be and I don't think any attention should be given to them or the poison they leak into the world.

But you hurt someone I care a great deal for and so I've decided to write this post so I can say this...

There are not enough people in this world willing to give their all and bare themselves to others in the hope of achieving connections and building relationships.  It takes guts to put yourself on a stage in a skimpy costume, dance your heart out and trust that the audience will treat you with respect.  It is bloody hard and a damn sight braver than sitting on a computer criticising the work of others from a safe emotional distance.

I like to think that this behaviour was a thoughtless moment in time - a product of distance between the person who wrote those things and the people they were writing about.  Let's close that distance and put it in a nutshell folks - you broke the heart of a beautiful woman who has brought nothing but joy and confidence to countless women who really needed it - some of us in our most desperate hour of self-loathing and need.  You need to have a good, long think about that and reconsider your actions and their impact on others.  And, just in case you still don't get it, I've dumbed it down to a level you might actually understand;

For the rest of you?  If you do ever go to see a show, cheer your guts out...not just for the awesome moves and the beautiful bodies but for the bravery of those who are willing to put it all out there for your viewing and entertainment pleasure.  Be a positive force in this world people.

Who I really am

It feels like a long, long time since I wrote anything here and that's because it has.  I've been ignoring the emails, the IMs and the phone calls although I am very grateful to know there are (or were) regulars who love reading my blog.  It's not that I've had nothing to say it's just that first of all I'm too busy to say it and second, life has been dark for some time now and I'm the sort of person who believes that people go to a blog to escape their own misery, not to vicariously experience yours.  Plus, I never was into self-pity.

I know I've largely dropped off the map the last few months.  No social engagements, few obligations...all my energy has been channeled into keeping me and my small family going.  You can't be cooking pumpkin soup for sick relatives when your kids are wearing the same school uniform for the fifth day in a row.  When you're running from school drop off to work, to the shops, back to the schools and then home to tackle four hours of domestics on your own you quickly realise your energy has to come from somewhere other than food and sleep alone.  So I've been using any time I can beg, borrow or steal to do things that make me happy and I also took the liberty of getting a counselor (more on him later).

Anyway, I remember in one of our sessions I told my counselor (whose name is Jonathon) that my biggest fear is that I don't know who I am any more.  Jonathon is extremely cool and likes to ask direct questions that cut through bullshit faster than a chainsaw through butter.  He immediately wanted to know why not knowing who I am concerns me.  Because, I said, everything I used to do that defined me is gone.  I don't know the person who's come to take the place of what got burned out and left behind.  I don't know what she likes, I don't know who her friends are, I don't know what she's going to be doing next week.  Frankly it's kind of scary.  I feel like a shell that might become something one day, but I don't have a clue what it will be.

A good place to start is doing things that make you happy, says Jonathon and I tell him I have that one covered.  Selfish is the new black apparently.  He laughs and says if you're doing 90% of everything in your household anything you do for yourself isn't selfish it's mandatory.  Okay, I say, anyway, here's my list, replicated here for your viewing pleasure.  It includes, but isn't limited to the following;

Burlesque
Swing dancing
Lots and lots and lots of martial arts
Socialising with totally inappropriate people
Other things too scandalous to mention but can be briefly summarised as "ongoing attempts to wake people out of their suburban stupor and remind them that not only are they alive but there are more important things to do with your day than bitch about who stole your newspaper."

Jonathon blinked at me once I'd finished the list, sighed and asked me whether I realised that he always has to have at least three cigarettes and a bit of a lie down after our sessions.  No, I didn't realise that, I reply, why on earth is that?  He laughs and says it's not every day you meet someone who freely admits they're riding the edge of death and has rather decidedly said fuck you and fuck your anti-depressants I'm going to focus on becoming the coolest chick on the planet as my therapy and fix myself on my fucking own. (Jonathon says fuck a lot, another reason I really like him.)


I must have looked a bit bemused because he laughed, shook his head and said I might not feel like I know who I am but it's not that I'm a new person or a shell that might become a new person.  Rather I've simply ceased pretending to be someone else and decided to be who I really am and no one else.

If that's true, I said, why do I still feel so miserable?  And why do I feel like I don't recognise myself in the mirror?

Because, he replied, you just don't realise what you've done yet.  But you will eventually and then you'll see that you've used what you call your trial by fire to burn away everything that's unnecessary, everything that's holding you back, all the bullshit obligation, niceties and formalities and now you're down to the core - which I think you'll find is tempered steel in the shape of someone you quite like being with a life that's bloody fun to live.

At the time I was spectacularly dubious, despite my respect for the chain smoking, filthy-mouthed, uber-cool Jonathon.  But tonight as I sorted the washing I was thinking to myself how much time I waste getting ready to go anywhere and I realised how totally inefficient it is to order my wardrobe by tops, bottoms, pyjamas, etc.  Five minutes into sorting all my clothes and my various accessories into "burlesque", "martial arts and boxing", "work" and "casual wear" I started to laugh.  I'm still tired and running on almost nothing but Jonathon's right, I'm finally myself and it's someone I really like.  Mother, wife, friend, daughter, arse-kicking stripper extraordinaire.  And I'm back blogging.  So stop harassing me.