Last night I attended a performance of the Wasabassco Traveling Burlesque Revue & Medicine Show. Having never attended a burlesque performance before, I was ill-prepared for the amount of lascivious fun to be had.  In a refreshing departure from the inorganic extremities that modern pornography perpetuates, the women featured — Anita Cupcake; Nasty Canasta; and GiGi La Femme — represented both the beauties and imperfections of the female figure in an unabashed celebration of innuendo, entertainment, and a past time when staring at a naked woman on stage chiseled buoyant smiles on the faces of audience members.

A Washington D.C. crowd packed into the Palace of Wonders featured a nearly equal ratio of men to women. Both genders hooted, hollered, and howled with well-mannered obstreperousness at the engaging stage presence of the three tattooed women, who used the performance as a sort of ongoing, light-hearted drama involving veiled backstage drunkenness, mismanaged apparel, and the first day of exceedingly hot temperatures in the Nation’s Capital.

At one point in the evening, the principle show master, Jonny Porkpie, ruminated on former New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who once commented that burlesque shows catered to morons and perverts. Using the quote, Porkpie turned the antiquated commentary of Mayor La Guardia into an opus for the evening, asking the quote unquote morons and perverts of the audience to raise their voices in shameless unison.

With respect given to the once-Mayor of America’s grandest city, the exclamations of the crowd banished the opinion and general mindset of Mayor La Guardia to the fate it deserves: whisked away into irrelevancy by swinging tassels among an orgy of unrepentant entertainment.

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