Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

So, there's a lot of territory between this blog entry wrap-up of the inaugural Monsters of Burlesque tour and the actual tour itself, and that's because as soon as we got off the road and back home I hit the ground running at my then-two-weeks old new day job--two days after we got back was the gala benefit--and I'm still catching up. The summary: the tour was a tremendous success, and as a now-experienced (ahem) road producer, the best way to guarantee a tremendous success is to bring along a group of performers that are not only brilliantly talented but extremely flexible (in all senses of the word, considering the amount of crap we had packed in one Honda Odyssey) who love hanging out together and have a great amount of respect for what they do and each other. Yeah, that goes a long way. There they all are in front of our first venue, Gilly's in Dayton. Yes, that's the same building as the Greyhound station, but when you get inside it's the premier blues and jazz club in the Midwest. Anyway, right to left that's Jonny Porkpie, Clams, Nasty Canasta, Creamy Stevens and Ron aka DJ Fresh Prince of Darkness, who we could not have done the trip without--another important tip, bring a talented DJ and sound guy along for the ride. He ran sound 3 out of 4 shows and the only one where we had sound and cue issues was the one without him behind the board.

There is too, too much to dump in one blog post about the experience of this tour: four cities, four shows in four days, staying with family at every stop, playing for packed crowds, every number went over huge...at some point it becomes a jumble of anecdotes, the borderline surreal experiences of bringing what we do to the state of our birth. My brother calling me after our Dayton show to tell me that the slideshow of our show is the most emailed slideshow of the year at the Dayton Daily News. Jonny breaking three of his props onstage in the course of one show in Columbus. Doing the show in the basement club at Oberlin College, my home town, for a huge pack of students seemingly a quarter of our age...and the College President...and my sister who flew from Chicago to surprise me...and a half dozen of my high school friends...and the minister that married us and his wife...and my mother. Arriving at the Sachsenheim Hall, the drafty former Guild Hall that was our Cleveland venue, to discover a Dominican 6-year old's birthday party going on in the party room across the hall from the bar where we were doing the show, the local go-go troupe the Pussyfoot Girls mustering up one of their friends at the last minute to run our door for us...and then packing the place to the rafters for the last show of the trip. On the way home, getting the inevitable speeding ticket from the improbably named Officer Butcher, shocking our East Coast native passengers with the most polite traffic stop in history. And at the end of it all, hours in the car and show after show, not a single argument. You can check out some pictures on flickr here too.

And I can't wait to do it again.

Kick the tires and light the fires

The van is picked up, the cast is ready to go, the bags are (almost) packed, and we're ready to hit the road for the Monsters of Burlesque tour! The goal was to blog more of the process of kicking off our first multi-city, multi-show tour...but, yeah, it has been busy. Like, busy-busy. I'd like to say that I'll liveblog from the road...yeah, that's not gonna happen. But it is going to be awesome. Full report on return.

How about some good news?

It was a long, gray, dreary day, appropriately enough for the day that the MTA voted to follow years of their own fiscal irresponsibility with a rate hike-service cut combo meal that promises to fundamentally change the lives of anyone who uses New York public transit-especially those of us who frequently use it after, say, 7:00 at night. Unless Albany fixes everything, so, you know, good luck to all of us!

So, how about some happy new from today instead! Today we officially launched the hardcore promotional campaign for our biggest producing endeavor to date: the Monsters of Burlesque tour 2009! We're bringing NYC burlesque stars to venues throughout the great state of Ohio, and we're gonna blow the roof off the joint. This has been a long, long time in the planning, much more to come!