Cirque du SO ME!

Sigh, short lil' me and a statuesque Miss Chastity. This super model dame has some mighty gorgeous long legs, all the better to run marathons with. MC Chastity is probably over 7 feet tall when you combine her bouffant hairdo and nosebleed heels. Va va voom!

Burlington rounded off a heady celebration of 25 years of Pride at Higher Ground on Saturday with the mighty Cirque du so Gay (be on the look out for the Stuck in Vermont vlog Tuesday).

Naked sexy people, plenty of pasties, sequins galore, whip-wielding hotties, glamorous ball gowns, a community love fest, balls out dancing, lots of squealing (mostly from me) and so many new and old friends! When I wasn't running into someone I haven't seen in forever, I was making all sorts of new pals for life.

I met some sassy strangers who watch The Deadbeat Club on cable access or the Stuck in Vermont vlog at Seven Days. Random people in the hall or bathroom telling me they loved my mom and my sister and watch all this crap I churn out regularly!? What? Really? Moi!? * Blush, blush *

Above is me and the fabulously talented songbird, Dana Smitten. If you watch Stuck in Vermont you get to hear her dulcet notes over and over again (someone even sung this to me at a party the other day!?).

"We're trapped in, trapped in Vermont." Can you believe that I am still not sick of this song tidbit, even after hearing it about a gazillion times!?! You can see The Smittens at Metronome this Friday - woot!

Above is the amazingly talented dancer, singer, musician, go go dancer and Pistol Packing Papa, Miss Sarah Mell. The go go girls were working it so hard that their pasties fell off from all the sexy sweat! They had a back-up pair but by the end of the night, who knows if they were still attached?!?!
Above is the sultry diva, Allison the Mistress of Ceremonies who explained that she prefers to give orders, not take them - DUH! Please don't use the whip Mistress!

Below is the Order Giver, Master of Ceremonies and event organizer, Shawn Lipenski. I have never felt so short in all my life. Shawn, Chastity and the Sisters LeMay towered above me. It felt delicious to feel so small but next time I am wearing taller shoes and higher hair!
"Meow," says Don the sexy pink-eyed roller boy. Not everyone can pull of a headband, headphones and Hello Kitty - Don is special like that. Ffft!
My friend Tracy got me the wildly popular book Eat, Pray, Love and I read it cover to cover in days. One of the main themes is learning how to BE YOURSELF. This sounds easy enough to do but still, DAMN IT, it is so blasted hard.

It is easy enough to say, "I am being me." But who the hell is "me" and how the hell do you be ME when you are so busy trying to think what to say, do and how to respond in the moment. ME is complicated. Me takes thought. Maybe I am over-thinking this!?

I asked many of the revelers at Cirque du so Gay what "pride" meant to them. Many of them defined pride as BEING YOURSELF, or being someone else, or being whatever the hell you want to be in this moment without fear of repercussions.

So in honor of Pride and 25 years of protesting, celebrating, dressing up, and having the guts to be who you are openly - I am going to say what I like, act as I please and not waste time trying to impress people.

I pledge to squeal loudly, dress brashly and make a big, utter fool out of myself. Yeah, yeah, I know, how is this different than my normal behavior? Damn good question.

Cause I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me."

PS It will be tough to whittle 1.5 tasty hours of Cirque footage down to a 5 minute bite sized Stuck in VT chunk. The secret? Equal parts obsession. caffeine, Ben and Jerrys, sleep deprivation, nicotine and kitty purrs. Meow.

PPS For more Pride fun, visit the House of LeMay blog. They have lovely Cirque du so Gay pics as well as pics from the entire fun-packed weekend! Oof!

Love the Lesh

Man, you gotta, gotta, GOT TO love the Lesh. How can you not love someone who rocks a side pony, transforms thrift store dresses into skirts and attends the Big Lebowski Fest dressed as a severed toe? Yeah, say no more.

Lesh has created a blog, The Lesh Bomb, to detail her hijinx-filled adventures and was kind enough to feature MOI (ooh, head ready to burst from so much yummy attention). It is my best review yet, especially as it is entitled, Jackie Collins, Eat Your Heart Out...If You're Not Dead Already - see, I told you that you would love the Lesh (unless you are Jackie Collins that is...and she may be dead for all we know...?)!:

If I went to Africa, kidnapped a thousand monkeys, somehow brought them back to the states under the cover of darkness, and sat them in front of a thousand typewriters in a warehouse in the bowels of a big city...let's say St. Paul...they could not write enough to contain the brilliance of miss Eva and her brainchild, The Deadbeat Club, an hour-long show she puts together every month for Burlington's cable access station. Those monkeys probably couldn't write Shakespeare either, much less a blog like hers. Here is the second installment in the Offasty series, in which I happen to portray a drug addict who hides yogurt in her dress while rocking the side pony. - The Lesh Bomb

And did I mention that there is another Offasty in the can starring Lesh and her man Seth La Douche and the ever-fabulous Suzanne-"Who-Would-DO-Such-a-Thing?!". Coming soon to the next episode of DBC...stay tuned...

Cool VT Blog

I have been digging Jeff's Vermont blog Midnight Modern Conversation for some time now. He is a super cool outdoorsy guy and goes on lots of healthy hikes and takes neat pictures along the way.

Definitely check out his flickr stream for a great taste of Vermont. Jeff likes to take pictures of butterflies, mushrooms, the moon, old train cars, etc. but is branching out these days into other areas. His cyclist photos were recently featured in the Free Press (link) and his beautiful butterfly pic, above, recently got some love on flickr.

In Jeff's words:

"I don't anticipate that this blog will have a wide audience. It is really just a writing exercise that I should have probably kept to myself. It will try and adopt a post-consumerist, post-carbon sentiment without being too dour and depressing. "

Sigh, the plight of all bloggers. Seems to me that blogging is basically a lot of people doing writing exercises better kept to themselves but shared none-the-less. Still, there is nothing better than pictures of butterflies and bugs to counteract this modern day depressing state of affairs. Oh, and modern midnight conversations never hurt either!

PS And Jeff, if you read this, thanks for the mini bottle of champagne. I drank it while watching my new episode and it hit the spot! ;)