I just had a marvelous road trip to the East coast with Tinker Bell, Brion Bonaventura and Vera d´Vil!!! We did a show at Ravintola Kulttuurikulma, very nice place and sweet audience, thank you for the lovely feedback after the show! Seemed to be quite a few first timers watching but from the sound of it they weren´t at a burlesque show for the last time. Yippee!
I have to go and pack for the week and then, since the lawn mower is broken and I can´t do that I *have to* take a foot bath ;) I´ll leave you with some pictures and get back to ya when I have a brain instead of glue in my head. Ta!
Goofying around on the way. Vera looks like she just heard a bad joke and I look drunk.
Pre-fruithat backstage.
Cramming-a-jammin´ in the tiniest backstage
Legz after.
The thing I miss most from my flight attendant days (apart from my colleagues) is hotel brekkies <3
It´s Friday again! Tomorrow there will be sun, a roadtrip and girl power :) Me and some of the Itty Bitty Tease Cabaret- girls are heading to the East Coast for a show in Pori! You should check out the line here! I did some (last minute) adjustments to my costume...I might not have shared this with all of you but i´m terrible at sewing. As in...*horrible*. I have not worn that costume in a few months and you can imagine my horror when I checked it last week to see that all is as it should be and NO! there´s a melon missing! Being in the middle of May as a teacher my schedule is crammed so I had no time to visit Lohikari but fortunately I had some plastic fruit at home (hmpf, yeah...one of those things that burlesque brought in to my life: never throw shit away because you might need it! This goes for all things blingy and strange). The problem arose when I -being the absolute idiot in sewing anything, I realized I should put the grapes on the arse. Yes.
Because it´s funny and because it´s stupid.
Well, I have some frillies on my pants on my bum. So after knickering and knackering for a while and getting that goddamn fruit there I realized the grapes will get STUCK on the frillies!!!
Sometimes it´s a good thing to have a very practical person living with you. As now. "Do you want the humor-degree to go up when the grapes get stuck?".......Well when you put it that way.... So, knickering, knackering everything off and everything from the start. So snap said the snappers. Oh, not to mention the new snaps are smaller in size than the previous ones so being this tired it made an extra little excitement to the whole thing :) But alas, it´s done and that´s that.
I also filled in my ESTA-application since I´m going to Florida next week Sunday (3rd of June). If you have any good ideas of what to do around Delray (Miami) please let me know! Next week will be something...all from sexual councelling-classes to coaching a dance group to having my class of teens to my house to saying good-bye to my work-as-I-knew-it.... *phew* Maybe a holiday in the hot sun will be just what the Doctor ordered me at the end of it all?
Anyway, hope you have a great weekend and do come see us tomorrow in Pori if you´re around! Ta!
I love this. I´m a stripper already but this could be me in grade 3. And me, almost 40, not getting a teaching job.
The passing of many great musicians within a year got me thinking about how important the role of music has been in my life. We are all children of our times of course and one thing that really makes me feel my age is realizing I have no idea what my students listen to. They seem to be in to 90´s techno and then theres that odd band t-shirt stolen from the parents closet but those "new" bands or singers are totally beyond me. I asked them to name a band they listen to and I had never heard that name. Oh yeah, middle-aged I am :)
Inspiration to a new number often comes to me in a song, but music has been with me pretty much since childhood. My mum used to work for CBS so we had plenty of LP-records at home when I was a kid. The cool cover of Wild Cherry (even if I learned to love funk only a bit later), the LP-boxes with Santana and Olavi Virta... I remember putting on Baccara, staring at the gorgeous women on the cover and lip-syncing (in to a round candle!) to ´Yes Sir, I can Boogie´...
Actually, we had a bit of a Baccara-moment with Sandy this Spring when we were on a gig in Turku. She was wearing her white fan dance outfit and I was in jeans with my my new black "Kiss" pasties and I just burst in to laughter looking at us in the mirror.
My first C-cassetes were Jackson 5, Wham! and Duran Duran - how appropriate for the times. I remember listening to Cyndi Lauper, Madonna and those Swedish pop-wonders that were featured in Frida-magazine...Herreys, Tomas Ledin (´Sensuella Isabella´ anyone?), Gyllene Tider... So I guess it started with pop but nothing really rocked my world like Bon Jovi a few years after. Seriously,
I´m not very proud of that but what can I say? It got worse in my early teens though, when in came hair-metal bands like Skid Row, Extreme, Mötley Crüe and Guns´n´Roses. I loved Hanoi Rocks (still do!) and Aerosmith. When ever I would have a little money I ran to the record shop and am now the proud owner of LPs such as The Cult´s `Sonic Temple´, Ugly Kid Joe´s ´ As ugly as they wanna be´ and one of my all time loves Faith No More´s ´Introduce yourself´.
The next Big Thing was -of course- Nirvana. I doubt if any of us who spent our late teens or early adulthood in the change of the 80´s and 90´s could miss grunge. Simultaneously punk came in to my life: Ramones, Pelle Miljoona, Buzzcocks, Nina Hagen, Sex Pistols, the Clash and of course later the East Bay punkers e.g Black Flag, Bad Religion, Rancid, Green Day, the Descendents, NOFX and those ska punkers such as Sublime, Operation Ivy and Skankin´ Pickle. The list os looong and varied.
Close to my childhood home we had a wonderful library with a really large selection of music so I would carry home shitloads of cd´s and just listen through and copy whatever sounded good to me. That´s how I fell in love with Sonic Youth. My mother didn´t appreciate this turn though, she enjoyed my Beatles-faze much more. Going to live gigs wherever in the world I have happened to live has been important as well. From Tavastia, Hellsinki to the Berkeley Square, Berkeley CA (RIP) I´ve been able to find great new bands just by going open mindedly to check out stuff I´ve never heard of.
Music can in an instant bring back memories, just like smells do. I get all nostalgic with certain songs and teary-eyes with others. I might not be as eager to argue over music anymore as I was but I have some passionate NO-NO´s (Mariah Carey- I think the fillings in my teeth are popping out when she sings) as some passionate YES! (give me Mike Patton in any form. Please.) Movie music is a whole other matter, - I get goosebumps with Tarantino´s soundtracks and what would Dirty Dancing or Flashdance be without that music?!
Another category if you will is of course music videos, that whole MTV-thing that for a little while made us teens feel like we belonged to a universal culture of adolecents. This of course was when MTV still stood for Music Television and not Mindblowingly Stupid Reality Shit.
I want to leave you with one of the most memorable videos (and songs) of those early days of my life. He still is the King and OMG I was in love with him watching those movies!!! *kiss*
The puppies kept me awake half the night so this Monday has felt like having glue in between my brain synapses. And you know how things get when you´re tired: that feather becomes a chicken in no time. So I figured I´d cook something really nice and go to bed early. I don´t think I will be able to solve my Big Issues On Life in this condition as life sometimes seem to throw you curve-balls just when you thought you had shit figured out :) Me and mr. Murphy, we´re *really* close!
Three more weeks to summer vacation and that I will start off by travels to Florida! Flying to Miami but staying in Delray so if you have some good ideas of where to go or what to do let me know! Here are some pictures from the Spring Awakening last Friday, some from the Anna Fur Laxis workshop on Saturday and also a link to an interview T.t. Tassel made with me...he´s so sweet! Have a good week, let´s hope the sun keeps shining! Ta!
Bettie, Pepper and Sandy backstage
Bent van der Bleu.....scary!
Babu G, the hostess with the mostess
In my glitter Olivia Rouge-dress with Wivian Wondrous and Millie Mimosa
...not quite sure what´s going on here but seems Bent got a catch...
With Sandy @ Raspberry Fields
Me backstage on Friday
Anna Fur Laxis taught some tricks to "illuminate" parts of your body. Here I´m illuminating my boobs?
The very cool and sweet Koko La Douce <3
Thee Dizzy Daisies with Anna Fur Laxis and Koko La Douce.
I will openly admit it: I´m a mummy´s girl. Have been, will be. My mother has been a huge inspiration for me...from watching her put on make up as a little girl to stealing her clothes in my teens I´ve always thought she has great sence of style. Even more than that she has taught me that one should treat people with respect.
We agree to disagree on a lot of things. She dislikes (to put it mildly haha!) my tattoos, she didn´t get burlesque in the beginning and she sometimes says things so politically incorrect that it makes me cringe. We don´t always approve of each others choices but (try to) respect that difference. We are similar in more ways than one: the same body type and the same laugh ( always too loud and in the wrong place) and we both have trouble in doing anything half-ways. She is even crazier than me with this, she always goes 250% which can be a little tiring to be around at times. We both think sharing is caring and we both cook for love (which means you will be fed. Always. Lots. Of. Food.) She also gave me the coolest sisters in town. My family is one filled with crazyass women!
We celebrate Mother´s Day today in Finland, so I want to wish all cool mothers all over a happy, sunny day!
My mum in a leopard dress at a party in the 80´s. Wearing animal print seems to run in the family :)
You know that feeling when you have sent like a million job-applications but the phone doesn´t ring?! Yeah well, that´s me right now. I try to keep my tail up, to think positive and not feel like a worthless loser but I´ll admit it: it´s not working out 100%. I have mentally prepared for a lot of different options if I don´t find a teaching job for next Fall, none of them are bad- hey, I´m damn good at waiting tables and I have been cleaning and I´m not afraid of doing odd jobs...it´s just that I *like* what I do. I never got the fact that some jobs would be "less worthy" than others. If it pays my bills and puts food on my table I´ll do it! I have been a very lucky girl so far that most of my plans have worked out in life and I´ve been able to educate myself and work in pretty damn cool places. With the amount of tattoos I have these days I guess going back to being a flight attendant is out of the question, though.
I guess there´s a meaning for everything and I will just figure it out later. Maybe this is the time to start my own business of burlesque and sex counseling? Maybe I´ll just be a trophy wife for the next year. Shit. I think I´m too old and not blonde enough for that.
I have been working since I was about 15, first weekends and summers and then all the time while studying but it´s always been working for someone, a firm or such. The idea of being self-employed is actually a bit scary to me. I know to artists this sounds ridiculous :) And being married to a self-employed farmer it makes it even more funny... But there you have it. My Spring promise is that I will start thinking in new spheres and allow myself to open new doors and dig in to new possibilities. Yes! But give me a month to get those last exams written and my students graded, my classroom cleaned and ...
In the meantime ya´ll should get tickets and come spend this Friday with us at Kaisaniemi- the Sinsational Spring Awakening is ON! Showtime is at 9pm and the line up includes such delicious people as Sir Willy Waterlily, Bent van der Bleau, Tinker Bell, Anna Fur Laxis, Kiki Hawaii, Koko La Douce, Frank Doggenstein, us Dizzies and if the weather permits Bettie Blackheart will light those tassels in the garden!
Another cool thing is I got my pictures from Kaylin Idora! They turned out great, she has such a personal style of doing photography. I´ll leave you with a few, maybe some ideas of my next year?
I could dust. Definetly.
I also climb to those hard-to-reach places!
I could be a lamp. Promise to be very still and not make any ruccus.
Let me read you out loud! Or, I could probably work in sales?
I make a pretty neat couch decoration as well. Very Easter-ish.
Happy first of May!!!! You might be celebrating workers, students or just having a sparkling wine brunch somewhere, Spring is here! And with my garden sprouting all kinds of flowers (and weeds) there is another weird Wappu-tradition in our house: animal babies. Last year one of our cats had kittens and now our dog is in labour! Two puppies so far!
Last night me and Sandy had a go go-dance gig with the Dangermen at Wäiski, such fun! Even our boots arrived from the UK on time: 8h before the gig :) My mother got all nostalgic when she saw them, apparently she has had a similar pair but read back in the 60´s.
Now I will continue the barbeque and wish you all a fabulous sunny day! Also remember to get those tickets to Spring Awakening! One and a half weeks to go!
Sandy with our outfit! They turned out great!
Les Girls.
My first try of a 60´s hair. The bouffant could have been bigger, need to figure out how to attach that rat.
