Flygirl

Thanks to those lovely folks at Clumsy Cabaret and Tiny Rebel Cardiff I have danced nearly my entire repertoire of burlesque routines this year, more than making up for the depressing inactivity of 2020-21. Soon I shall have to start making new routines or finding new audiences but either way, it's been one heck of...

Burlesque Showreel, Act 2

The second effort in my ongoing project to while away the quarantine by filming a showreel of my burlesque solos. I finally accede to popular pressure and choreograph a vampire routine, with homage to a certain classic 1980s film. This is not quite the debut I wanted for this act, but it is what it...

Masquerade

Curious how old obsessions can suddenly resurface... I was recently scouring my thoroughly disorganised CD collection to find something I had not listened to in a while to help me through my shift. Work, alas, continues to be demoralising, that warehouse environment being typically loud, laddish, sweary, and mansplainy, so I tend to rely on...

Mutant Musings

(Judi Bowker as Mina Harker in "Count Dracula," BBC version, 1977) A good friend of mine recently declared her intention to draw back from the depressingly polarised, prejudiced world of social media activism and instead express herself through her own dedicated writing. This seems an excellent idea to me, having myself spent far too much...

Gods and Monsters

Like any good goth, I was saddened yesterday to hear of the death of Christopher Lee (1922-2015): actor, opera singer, and unexpected heavy metal icon into his nineties. With over two hundred films on his CV, including recent blockbusters such as the Lord of the Rings franchise as well as cult classics like "The Wicker...

“Imago” – Part 2

Quicker than I thought possible, given that they had to be developed from vintage film, the pictures from Sunday's shoot have been developed and scanned. They have instantly proven to be the most interesting, artistic, and personally satisfying pictures I have ever had taken of me. Some were shot against a glass art installation on...

The Lousy Actress Strikes Again…

Today, "Anthony Burns" failed his last ever job interview. "He" went to it in full sharp-suited masculine persona, essentially pulling a cruel deception on the interviewers as they would have very soon discovered whom they had really hired (It was an internal vacancy, and my union rep will shortly be outing me to management as...

Eleanor the Insufferable

I have indeed finally chosen my legendary heroine name, in recognition of the fact that I can barely shut up about my "condition" these days for five minutes at a time, and people are getting heartily sick of it. My actual coming out made no splash whatsoever, but my refusal to change the bloody record...