A few pictures from this whirlwind weekend

Saturday "Spreading the Curtains" last show at Coco de Mer: This is the view from the surveillance camera from behind the stage so we know when to cue the music. For the group finale, Pandora's idea of "Pandora's Box" had us blindfolding the audience so we could set up the box where Maine and I were hiding inside. I just LOVE how the audience were so great and sweet, did as they were instructed. So awesome!! Below is a backstage photo of the costume we wore for "Pandora's Box".

Blindfolding the audience at Coco de Mer NYC

Backstage/office at Coco de Mer NYC

 Friday night, Gal Friday and I did a private party in the Upper East Side. She did her famous classic beatgirl tassel twirling and I did the fetish nun act at the request of the organizers. We showed them a really good representation of 2 burlesque styles. Gal really knocked them out. The women were SO into it. It was a great gig! The organizer introduced us, and there was a proper DJ, and a chair. I DID NOT fall over like at the last private gig - because these guys were pros!

Me with hat

Gal with hat

Waiting around

FaceBook-Unfriendly Photos

Since Facebook won't let me post these pictures on my Fan Page, these are some awesome pictures from the last Coco de Mer show with Ruby Valentine, Nikki LeVillain and myself. These photos were taken by Stacie Joy and Ed Barnas. To see the rest of the sets, click here.

Me

Nikki Le Villain

The Grand Finale

Ruby Valentine

Nikki LeVillain

News of all types!

So my parents have come and gone, and it was a very successful trip! They loved Beatles Burlesque on Monday night and they also really enjoyed the scenery along the Delaware River. We found a few waterfalls near Milford, PA and one of them was self-titled "The Niagara of Pennsylvania" - Bushkill Falls. I thought that was really funny considering that my pee-ing is bigger than some of the "waterfalls" in the park. Haha. We cooked dinner in the cabin at night and looked at the local stores during the day. I don't need to see another candle shop again in my life, much like my experience in Rome and Florence. I don't need to go inside another church in my life again either!

Me, Chewie and my Dad!

Our cabin by the Delaware River. Cozy but a little dirty and I did see a mouse.

They came to the Beatles Burlesque show and I have to admit, this past month's show was my personal favorite. There was a lot of variety in terms of guest musicians and a guest vocalist. Michael Cunio from Reckless Place (and Jersey Boys Chicago) has such great stage presence and he writhed on stage during Helter Skelter like fucking Axel Rose in his leather pants. He is also the lead singer for Reckless Place, the band Michael is now in, and they are playing this Thursday night at Ace of Clubs on Great Jones Street! 9 PM with a bunch of other rock bands!

Michael Cunio who wears eyeliner really well!

OMG the hotness factor with these three was INSANE!!!

I am really excited to see this show and not just because before the show, I'm going to see the Unsung Heroes of Burlesque photography opening with Dame Cuchifrita AND that upstairs from the Ace of Clubs is one of my favorite Cajun restaurants in all of NYC, Acme! I need an Oyster Po' Boy and a night to do other things and support Michael's show with Reckless so I won't be a Nurse Bettie this Thursday night. The following week is Thanksgiving so there are no shows on Wednesday and Thursday. The next time I'll be at Nurse Bettie is December 2 with Minnie Tonka, Fem Appeal, Gal Friday, Tansy, and Brassy.

I didn't take any clothes off! But I was a little potty-mouthed.

This past Thursday at NB I was getting ready behind our curtain when suddenly this little dark-haired pixie stuck her head inside and handed me a makeup case. It was so dark back there I didn't realize what it was until I opened it and saw a caseful of LIERAC skin beauty products from my favorite makeup artist Tina Turnbow (who does MU on celebrities like Christina Hendricks and who is a contributing writer for the likes of Marie Claire and Beauty Banter.

I've been using a product they have called Bust Lift - I figure preventive measures can't hurt, right? And now I'm incorporating more night and day items into my regiment. There were so many products in there that it took me a while to figure out what product to use and how. Very exciting!

Lierac - my latest beauty obsession

A couple of other show-related news:

• Beatles Burlesque will be at Crash Mansion on Monday, December 12. Show starts at 10pm! Same $10 just in Manhattan this time. Michael and I went by the space to check out the stage and it is very nice. Hardwood floors, a big stage, no dressing room just a green room so we'll have to bring a mirror on our own. But the space definitely feels more intimate with low ceilings and banquet-style booths and small cabaret-style tables in the front. Plus they are in Manhattan right by Bowery Ballroom, near many subway stops. Hopefully that will entice the Manhattanites to are reluctant to go out on a Monday night to bring their bodies out to this awesome show! 

Inside the Green Room of December's Beatles Burlesque

• I have a new show called "Tails & Feathers" starting Friday, November 19 at Toro Lounge which is the Smyth Thompson Hotel's downstairs lounge in TriBeCa! The show is free with complimentary drinks from 10-11pm and the show starts at 11pm. This inaugural show will feature some of my favorite performers who I am very familiar with, not only their personalities, the quality of work they bring, but also their oeuvre (haha, I felt like using that now). Gal Friday, Bird of Paradise, and I'm thrilled to bring Shelly Watson's goose-bump-enducing, move you to tears opera singing to this show! The event manager was very excited about having opera there as am I! I have a feeling this will become a monthly show or even bi-monthly. Fingers crossed that the Tribeca folks will like it!

New show! Tails & Feathers at Toro Lounge in The Smyth Hotel/Thompson Tribeca

Toro Lounge

Toro Lounge

3.  Looks like Macao Trading Company will also be doing something special for their New Year's Eve dinner party as well. I will be announcing that shortly...as soon as I finish designing the flyer for that night! Last year I was at Chow Bar doing Dim Sum Burlesque's NYE dinner/show and went to Macao afterwards and danced on the top of their dining table as Bryan Helm documented here!

NYE 2009

Tonight I am gogo dancing at Kings County Bar in Bushwick/East Williamsburg tonight with Deity, Belle a Go-Go and Stormy Leather. I'm so excited cause I put together 3 KILLER outfits to wear tonight. I LOVE gogo-ing nights sometimes you just wanna dance (not to sound totally like one of those "I'm a happy girl with my white iPod riding my bike and I LOVE the world and I LOVE my life!!!") but .... yeah I do love to dance and eat a big burger afterwards at 3am then finding money in your bra later.

Monday November 15 "Drunken Dragon Night" at Macao and Sapphire Jones will be performing! I'm very excited to have her there for the  first time. The open bar this Monday is provided by Wild  Turkey from 9-11pm. Show is at 11pm. Free admission.

Saturday November 20 is "Spreading the Curtains" at Coco de Mer and also The Naughty Housewife's birthday celebration so please RSVP because it's going to sell out again. I have a new act that I'm debuting that night and we have a very special group act as well. He he. The line-up is Peekaboo Pointe, Lil Steph from Philly who was showcased in this year's Ms. Exotic World. Please call the NY store at (212) 966-9069 to RSVP. Open bar provided by 42Below. $25cover. Show starts at 8pm.

Getting Spanked & Then Mind Fucked

Pan & the Nymphs. 
Photo by Vishnu Hoff, 2010.

Waaahooo!!! Saturday night's show at Coco De Mer was spectacular, grand, and so much fun. Most of the audiences in my show are non-burlesque performers and almost every time, they are new to the art form. I love performing and producing for this audience, because I always remember that feeling of enthrallment and excitement when I saw Little Brooklyn & Creamy Steven's Starshine Burlesque show at Rififi's about 6 years ago. I, too, want to create that feeling, atmosphere, thrill and excitement for other people so that I will be immortalized in their minds! Mwa Ha ha!! I'm just kidding. In all seriousness though, one does remember the moment true inspiration happens to you. Burlesque in its theatricality, campiness, and ostentatiousness seems to be the intersection of all my various, random lifelong interests and obsessions. When I encountered it, it all fell in places these disparate parts of my life that I didn't know why I was interested in.

Pan showing the silly nymphs how to really use the sex toys!
Photo by Vishnu Hoff, 2010.

The pictures you see is from our group finale conceived by Dame Cuchifrita with me and Pandora. Dame is the goddess Pan and Pandora and I are the nymphs cavorting in the forest. This act is SO on point and captures the cheeky British humour that is very much Coco De Mer. It was brilliantly executed and the music was both hysterical and beautiful at the same time. It was so much fun doing this act! I hope we can find another appropriate venue to do this act again because its wicked!!! And Dame REALLY did spank me hard with the vinyl paddle!

The nymphs discover Pan and their sexual desires.
Photo by Vishnu Hoff, 2010.

We sold out again this weekend, but the next "Spreading the Curtains" show will be Saturday, September 11. We are taking August off because it's a slow show month with people away on vacation, etc. I, for one, will be in Mexico again for a week!

Me at Coco De Mer with 42Below. Thank you 42Below!
Photo by Vishnu Hoff, 2010.

I also saw Inception this weekend. It is brilliant and sophisticated. I loved the metaphors: the projections, the subconscious, the falling backwards, etc etc. It's funny that Leonardo di Caprio has done two films back-to-back on a similar subject, the unreliability of reality. Shutter Island was also about the telescoping of realities, dream state versus non-dream state. I was anticipating that twist all the way through Inception and voilá! I was right. I did like how they incorporated the idea of "paradox" in architecture and used MC Escher's famous "Penrose stairs" as an example. There were many other references to dreaming and dreams. It's a good movie to watch if you like thinking about dreams, lucid dreaming, and various mysteries of dream vs. reality. They must have talked to tons of people to collect similarities we all have while dreaming such as the sensation of falling. Inception follows a grand sci-fi tradition on the timeless topic of mind-body dualism that, as of late, popular culture has become more fascinated by. The Matrix, Ghost in the Machine, and Avatar are more examples of the separation of mind and body. In Inception, one of the conundrums was whether one could believe one's "perceived reality" versus a "real" reality. I think I would just pick one and stick with it instead of torturing myself about whether I'm sleeping or dreaming. This kind of attitude got me a D+ in my Philosophy 101 class at Cornell which this movie reminded me of. I had to write a paper on Descartian dualism. I can't recall what I wrote but I remember citing many science fiction writings as well as zombies. I did not like Professor Wood. This is not a sexual pun!!! I was really bad at writing papers for philosophy classes. It seemed like writing about nothing and talking to nobody! After that, I tried Sleep Psychology and Abnormal Psychology and even the Magic Mushrooms and Mischievous Molds class from the Plant Pathology Department, and I did SO much better in those classes. Guess I am more interested in people's minds than the ethereal nothingness... But anyway, more excitingly, is that before the movie, I saw the trailers for Resident Evil 4: Afterlife AND Tron Legacy!! How did I not know about the remake of Tron!? The Resident Evil trailer looked super fun and I can't wait to see it cause Milla is fierce!!

I have an easy week this week hooray! Just Nurse Bettie so I can actually see some friends and maybe have a small dinner party too, if I'm really ambitious. Next week though... shows every night and Albert Cadabra's Skullduggery And Skin Show in DC at the Palace of Wonders! I've never done this show before and I'm psyched to take the Subaru Outback on the road with Albert and Gigi Lafemme!

Next Coco de Mer Show

There's so much to say but I'm working so much. Tomorrow I have the day off so I will catch up on my experience at the Colorado Burlesque Festival. For now, here's the info on the next show at Coco de Mer with me, Gal Friday, and Dame Cuchifrita who is doing this amazing group piece that I can't wait to be in! Just the music alone is simply GRAND. Saturday, July 24. 8pm. $25 with open bar provided by 42Below. Call the NY store to RSVP. The event sold out last time and we had to turn away 15 people. So don't miss it! 212 96 69 0 69

Adventures with Facebook Ads!

I've been trying out Facebook ads to promote Beatles Burlesque (Monday, June 12) and the Coco de Mer show (Saturday, June 21).















It's high time I made the foray into social networking advertising since this is the career I've spent the last decade working in. I find that I actually DO notice the little ads on the right-hand side when I'm on Facebook (which is A LOT) whereas I've - and I think most people have as well - become numbed by Flash banner ads on major sites like CNN, iVillage, MSN, etc. Everyone I ask say they never pay attention to those banners whereas everyone I've asked about Facebook ads say they DO notice and click on them. Some of the FB ads are horrendous, made to be ultra simple with one image, one headline, and one short blurb. It's designed inside the FB environment which makes it reallly easy to create an ad yourself but that also means anyone Tom, Dick, and Sally can make one - such as the below atrocious example of letting the mass get creative (for more examples, click here):











I come from the world of rich media campaigns with fancy rollovers, expanding skyscraper units, mini-site-in-a-box, video embedded, eyeblasters, etc etc etc, so it is really refreshing to see ads that are simple with nothing running across the page or some art director's clever trompe l'oiele spicy chicken sandwich "burning a hole" in my browser page. An effective one-hitter.

So how effective have my two ads been? Well, its only been 3 days but it is really exciting to log on every few hours to see how many clicks they've gotten. The numbers keep climbing up! Creating the ad itself is really easy. Then you can select who you want to target via age, sex, relationship status, geographic location, etc. You can further target users who may already be connected to your fan page (if you have one) or users who are NOT connected to a specific fan page. You can select how long the campaign will last, and you can specify how much money you are willing to spend a day based on clicks and/or impressions. (Clicks are when a user actually clicks on your banner and impressions just mean when the ad is served up and appears on a user's page). I have also learned some do's and don'ts in my playing around. For instance, targeting too many groups based on "interests" will limit how often your ad is served up which means less people see it and less clicks and less effective. Unless you are VERY specific and selling something like "dwarf frog fans who like to cross-dress as devil clowns" then I would suggest skipping that "Interests" part completely. If you are selling an event, you definitely want to reach as many people as possible. Facebook is also very strict about not showing nudity so I had to crop my pictures a few times until the ads were approved. Be selective about the words you choose too. They don't allow any porn or dirty words like "cum". ha ha.

One last thing, as a Facebook abuser, I don't want to leave the page. It annoys me if I click on an ad and it replaces the page I was on. So make sure you create an event page first then create an ad that links to that event instead of an external link to another site. Here's someone's write-up about how he didn't like FB ads. He has some good points. I think it's still a good place to try out your target audience, especially if you are trying to build brand awareness. FB's impressions alone is worth it.

I'm so psyched about having the weekend off to work on my new piece for Coco de Mer. Monday night is Beatles Burlesque. And based on what I'm hearing, it's going to be really packed! There may be free delicious nibbles (not niPPles) passed out at this show. :)

Summertime!

For the last 2 nights I stayed in because I had a bunch of promotional and booking stuff to do. I went to the gym during the day, made food at home, and it was nice. But - apparently 2 nights in is all I can handle bcause last night at Nurse Bettie I was in a MOOD and by the end of the night I was on the bar dancing to Stacey Q's "Two of Hearts". Who remembers and LOVES that song??? I do! And woah, I just remembered now that I made a reference to the 4th dimension as "time" - Hello, Rudy Rucker and Flatland! I was entranced by Gemini Rising's holographic pasties that looked like it was 3-D and somehow I ended up talking about time. Man. What did Jen put in my drink?? I didn't want to go home! When I did get home I was so wired I had to watch that dumb Lopez talk show to wind down. How could you not wind down watching boring crap like that at night?

In other news, my favorite speakeasy bar in the West Village, Employees Only, has now added one hot burlesque performer every Sunday night at midnight to spice things up! It's a one-off with no MC-ing or anything. I am booking for them. Amber Ray just did the first weekend, I am going this Sunday. I love working with the EO crew. They also own Macao Trading Company. Both venues treat performers with tremendous respect and will treat you like a star! I really enjoy working with them. The rest of the month and June looks like this:

May 30: Gal Friday
June 6: Dame Cuchifrita
June 13: Madame Rosebud
June 20: Lil Steph
June 27: Stormy Leather
July 11: The Maine Attraction
July 18: Pandora Scintillator

I am also SO excited about the Coco de Mer show on Saturday, June 19th with Amber Ray and Madame Rosebud. I want this to be glam, flash, showgirl, classic, fetish, and end it with an original erotic theater piece that Rosebud and I are co-creating. The show will start at 8pm with an open bar of a vodka punch bowl and 2 kinds of muddled cocktails (flavors will alternate month to month) - the cover is $25 a person. That's a pretty good deal for your starting point on a Saturday night out. Also the space is very limited, I think we can comfortably get in about 30-35 people in the show room, so it's not going to be one of those lame open bar clusterfuck scenarios where the line is like 10 deep (ie: Shecky's Girls Night Out with open bar is case in point). You will definitely get your drink on and we will get our burlesque on! RSVP is required though and you can do that by calling the store 212-966-9069.

More exciting news to be unveiled soon on June 11. Here's a glimpse...

Photo by Michael Webb.

My birthday, a new show, butt plug, a new act

That's what's going on in the last couple of weeks! Wednesday was my birthday - 35!!! I have no qualms about my age and I'll tell anyone who ask how old I am. Frankly I have no idea why it's such a big deal. I don't care if I'm 35 or 45 cause I never want to be in my 20s again. I have liked every new year of my life better than the last year. And I'm having the best motherfucking time ever in my life in every aspect of my life. I would have NEVER ever dreamed of this when I was in high school. The high school me thought the 35 year old me would be a journalist of some kind successful in some way (I was voted "most likely to succeed" my senior year). I don't think I ever pictured myself married or with kids though. That scenario never entered into my "visualization board". I refuse to define my sense of success and happiness through mainstream culture. Vivian Luu of The Northwest Asian Weekly recently wrote this article about one of my burlesque heroines, The Shanghai Pearl out in Seattle, and she kindly interviewed me and let me share the article too.

The other new thing that I've been working on has finally been finalized this week. I am starting a new monthly Saturday night show with UK luxury lingerie and erotic toy boutique Coco de Mer at their little velvet room in the back of the flagship Nolita store. The first inaugural show is Saturday, June 19 at 8pm. Seating starts at 730pm. 42Below vodka is my official alcohol sponsor for the show and will be featuring a punch bowl and two muddled cocktails that will rotate monthly. This show is a little over an hour long and will be open bar provided by 42Below. The cover is still TBD but believe you me, you will hear more about this show. It's very exclusive because the room can only fit 35 people. The line-up will be announced shortly, but so far Amber Ray and Madame Rosebud are on board! The show will be called "Calamity Chang Presents Spreading the Curtains at Coco de Mer" - I will host the event and have obviously burlesque performances but I'm also going to finally do the 2 other performances I've been dying to do: prose interpretation of a piece of erotica and a demonstration performance utilizing one of the boutique's sex toys.

Speaking of new acts, I found this beauty at the store. I've been looking for a jeweled butt plug for an act then I saw this beauty. But next to this beauty was a butt plug that has a horse tail at the end!!! I think I stopped breathing for 2 seconds when I saw the horsetail butt plug. I must have it!!


Tonight I'm celebrating my birthday with a limo ride - having some friends over for a drink first then headed up to Dinosaur BBQ in Harlem cause that's Texas to me! Peanut shells on the floor, live music, and an ol skool limo provided by Al Limosine!

Here's what I found when I came home this afternoon. Michael decorated the apartment to surprise me!! No one other than my mom has ever successfully surprised the Chang. Not an easy feat to do.