“I am the one on stage undressing, but I am not the one revealing myself to you, rather you are the one revealing yourself to me in the milky glow of the reflecting stage light.” I cannot tell you in words just how much I enjoyed the fuck out of this book. I listened to the audiobook because there is nothing my neurodivergent brain loves more than a memoir or personal essay being read by the author. This book made me miss phone sessions at the dungeon. The creativity involved to get a session just right with nothing much more than my sadistically creative mind, my voice, and a telephone “line”. Fancy Feast articulates this nostalgia exquisitely. If there is a thing I love equally to a memoir being read by the author, it's burlesque – specifically “weird” burlesque, which is actually more traditional than most think, we just don’t refer to it as classic nowadays. Fancy recounts winning the Miss Coney Island annual competition – which, as a carnie who has never been to New York, holds a very dear and special place in my heart. There were many audio “bookmarks” I left on this file, much like dog-earring a page.
If there is a thing I love equally to a memoir being read by the author, it's burlesque...
The book covers a lot of topics with a care and love that is warming. It discusses the fine line between burlesque and sex work and its intersections. It discusses the blatant fatphobia within the burlesque scene and how Fancy has grappled with and somewhat overcome those obstacles. There's talk of making an act out of eating cake from the hands of the audience. There’s recounting an evening eating grapes debaucherously draped over a bar at a fancy “upmarket” event. There’s so many quotes that have stayed with me and stuck in my memory
– always on my mind.
The line “down here in the muck is where I feel romantic,” has beautifully haunted me for the last twelve months until I listened to it again recently, with just as much verve. I’m surprised that no one has reviewed it for the Tryst.link blog already, I thought this book would have gained a lot of interest and notoriety by now. It's written so gosh darn well. I love just about any literary foray into the performance art scene of New York, but this is one I deeply cherished. I want people to know about it, I still want people to talk to about it. As a performer who has straddled both the burlesque and sex work industries I resonated with this book deeply. There were lines I still think about after nearly 18 months have passed. Notable turns of phrase include: “Even sparkly people are just people”, “burlesque fungus has taken over my brain”, “Like a fearless carnie”, “I was called to serve burlesque”, and “down here in the borderlands between virtue and vice… I get to learn about what people desire.”
The line “down here in the muck is where I feel romantic,” has beautifully haunted me for the
last twelve months...
Fancy Feast describes themselves as a sex clown, which is frowned upon by the people who relegate her to the sex toy parties she hosts. She describes ignorant people coming into the sex shop she works in to fondle the packers, and sternly telling these potential customers what they in fact are. She documents to the best of her ability the origin of the line “Pop A Pastie!” She clearly and concisely describes the punitive nudity laws in place in different American states. Fancy Feast’s writing on the preshow experience is incredibly relatable. She delves deep into the human experience of Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) and shares her experience of the fatphobia that often accompanies the condition. She courageously discusses how fucked film school is, and “whatever it is to glorify obesity”. There are no dark recesses left unexplored: there is analysis of gentrification, the prison industrial complex, advocacy, self-producing. In Fancy’s words “Filth is humanising.”
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