#vaudeville performer

[froot-batty]

it's tha joka baby

the great thing about having your own au is that you can take characters you dont like and make them completely different people until you like them

lore's under the cut!

??? (Nickname: J) lived a relatively simple life in the beginning. Coming from a terrible home, she never really flourished - simply went through the motions that were expected of any person in her generation. She eventually landed a job as a children's magician/clown, and while she was good at it, it didn't rake in as much money as she needed to live comfortably.

Especially considering the fact that she was a young, single mom. Her kid was about the only thing tethering her to a normal life, out of a desire to be better than her own parents were to her.

J had always had impulses. Desires. Be it a product of his upbringing, or his terribly boring existence, but he'd always had the desire to do bad things. Shake things up - like popping a bounce house with the kids inside, or bashing a particularly annoying participant over the head with his magician's wand. Things he'd repress, for obvious reasons. All except for one.

She had started stealing money or other valuables from her customers. Though she was desperate to be normal, J would often find ways to excuse her behavior. She wasn't able to keep the lights on at her current salary? Well, it was only fair that she took a little extra while on a job - she had earned it, after all; didn't you know how little this job paid? It wasn't anything they'd miss.

And that worked for a good long while. Until he opened his mailbox to find a letter.

The Red Hood Gang, in this universe, is basically a method of distraction. Does someone need everyone's eyes on something else while they go about their own plans? They pay Red Hood One to gather a group of his cronies and go cause mischief somewhere. J had been one of the people summoned to work as a Red Hood, as they had a whole heaping handful of evidence of her larceny as well as a clear threat against the life of her daughter.

With no choice, J donned the Red Hood. At first it went against everything she had been trying so hard to do; not to hurt people, or do anything bad, just keep herself in line. But, she couldn't deny...there was a certain freedom to it. When she donned the mask, she could be anyone she wanted, and no one would be able to tie what she did back to her.

Slowly, the guilt began to fade away. And J started to get ideas.

J adored the merry mischief that the Hoods would occasionally get into. Sometimes their plans were rigid (often defined by the person paying Red Hood One), but, occasionally, they were allowed to do whatever the hell they wanted. It was these times that J shined amongst the Hoods, as her plans were chaotic and nonsensical and drew in the people who also saw being a Hood as a chance at freedom. She eventually began to outshine Red Hood One, and would start to hold meetings with other Hoods in secret.

J began to wonder: what was the point of only having this sort of chaos contained to small bursts? So many people she knew - herself included - had been freed by chaos and madness. And she had seen firsthand the changes it could bring when the Hoods struck. Being paid for what they did didn't sit right with her; the nonsense of life should be a gift bestowed upon for free.

He had begun to sink deeper in the Red Hood ideals and lifestyle, and in turn started to neglect his normal one. He stopped stealing money, stopped putting effort into his job, and generally just...stopped being a person altogether. Being out of the mask felt like he was playing pretend now.

This did have one consequence that devastated him, though. His daughter, his only tether to normality, was taken away from him due to his accidental neglect in his ever-growing madness. This was the final thing to push J over the edge.

J had decided, then, that nothing in life mattered. It was a lesson she decided to teach the rest of Gotham - the only thing above all was madness, and chaos, and all of the things people locked deep inside themselves. J had already become popular amongst the Red Hoods, and so she finally took the mantle of Red Hood One by killing her predecessor. With her new title, she lead a new era of Hoods, ones who performed nonsensical crimes who had no pattern other than what caused the most disruption or destruction as possible. She was determined to paint the city mad.

When her and her Hoods were hitting Ace Chemicals, they were interrupted by Batman - who was a relatively new hero at the time. He had not known yet that the entire chemical plant was dangerously unstable, and as he engaged Red Hood One, the railing under their feet began to break. During their fight, it eventually gave way, and while Batman was able to cling to the edge and save himself, J wasn't so lucky.

After his accident in the chemical plant, J gave up completely the mask of the Red Hood. Now he had one burned permanently into his entire body. He took the moniker of the Joker, after a nickname he'd gained during his time as a Red Hood, and he's still deadset on showing Gotham the innate absurdness and chaotic meaninglessness of life.

....At least, that's what Bruce has pieced together. Who knows if any of it's the truth?

[silentdivasblog]

Lady of The Day 🌹 Fanny Brice ❤️

[vimbry]

they might be giants are excellent with contemporary or experimental sounds, but they also crush every singalong/traditional pop/old standard cover or stylistically-influenced duet they make.

[kupahdraws]

finally fucking redesigning jesi (and renaming her as well)

[thislovintime]

Peter Tork and Quentin Crisp, hosts of the 9th annual Beyond Vaudeville stage show in New York City on April 19, 1990.

“[The Ninth Annual Beyond Vaudeville Stage Show is] produced by the creators of Beyond Vaudeville, Cable-TV’s talk show from hell, and hosted by ex-Monkee Peter Tork and author Quentin Crisp (a match made in Limbo), the affair features ‘Female Elvis’ Dee Back, ‘nose-whistler’ nonpareil Jim Grosso and other offbeat acts B.V. fans have come to know and tolerate. Tickets are $3, with proceeds going to the Coalition for the Homeless.” - Daily News, April 18, 1990

“Peter Tork looked like a long shot to host a live Beyond Vaudeville Show in 1990 so as we got closer to the date and didn't hear back from him we went ahead and booked Quentin Crisp. When Peter came through we asked them if they would cohost together. Quentin, of course, readily agreed, as he did with pretty much everything. Peter wasn’t familiar with Quentin but agreed to cohost and the two ended up having a great time together. Asked 25 years later what he most remembered about that evening, Peter immediately replied ‘That woman who did the Underdog dance.’” - Beyond Vaudeville, Instagram, February 13, 2023 [x]

[justbusterkeaton]

Baby Buster being a kid

[discoinfernos]

I really miss my Erik Phantomoftheopera muse but that rpc is like soooo dead & my brain is only hellaverse right now . . . ha ha what if . . . I added a hellaverse au!Erik to my roster . . . jk . . . lest . . . ?

[laurenfoxmakesthings]

If you want my hometown and its vibe summed up...yeah, pretty much.

[travsd]

A Century of Burns and Allen

A century ago this year, George Burns teamed with Gracie Allen and made their debut in a vaudeville house somewhere in New Jersey. Nowhere that I’ve been able to find (and I and others have looked hard) does anybody seem to know where or when with more specificity, but Jersey in 1923 (or late 1922) seems to be the consensus. We’ve chosen today, George’s birthday, to announce that naturally we…

[200dayjourneykamo]

Day Four

August 27th, 2024 The giving in

I woke up with the memory of a feeling of a woman cuddling her back very intensely against the front of me, like a male Angler fish attempting to become one with his female of choosing. It was sweet. This dream was one for the books, one for a shaving scene. I had come across a couple of people who had warned me of a Boogey man of sorts that was near and they were covered in make up, ready and determined to deceive the boogey man. I learned that there was only two ways about it; I could come face to face with this Boogey man or I could deceive it. The idea of him catching on to my deceit was enough to know I was amongst the wrong crowd and quickly found my way away from these folk. I knew I must face him. The time came that I was in a room amongst many other people and he arrived, a bald middle aged white man, angrily barged through the open door, shooting his hand guns in the air. Then he pointed his hand guns at 2 or 3 different people and shot them dead where they stood. As he came across other people, he met them with peace and gave them a moment of divine peaceful energy and left them with something at their feet. When he came to me, I was nervous, but he stood at me, all knowing, his arms on my shoulders and for a moment, I felt peace. He carried on swiftly and I looked down. At my feet was a rectangular piece of plastic, the shape and size of a dollar bill. Bulging within the plastic was a design in red gel. It appeared to be the outline of a mountain, which then made a smaller, less jagged mountain within it. I knew immediately that this was the Devil who had come to tell us what would be the death of us. I make mountains out of mole hills.

I found him alone and went to talk to him about it, as he sat there, he was just a man. Approachable, no longer angry. I told him what I thought about my message and asked him if that was what he meant. He asked me what the symbol was and I drew it for him. He said, "ah." I responded by saying, "I can get it for you…" and I darted across the room. When I got back he was dissipating into the air and the message in my hand was nothing but plastic, not enough an outline to guide me.

The messages come in so clear and loud. Then the ego comes back, kindly asking for the wheel back, and we look out the window wondering why those mountains felt so familiar.

I felt like I was about to have a heart attack. There at the trampoline park with my two kids, I had two daquiris over the course of two hours, thinking if I stayed 3 hours that would be plenty of time. As I had often calculated this logic before and it worked plenty well enough in the past. I was hot, I felt out of myself, I felt dizzy, I certainly could have drank more water today, if any… and I, for the first time in my life, thought I might actually be having a heart attack. I breathed deeply and continued to casually chase my kids through the trampoline park. If I died there… what would come of me, my children, my belongings… it was not my time and I didn't believe it was my time, but with Ken Crimmins' death lingering in my heart and the tear soaked cheeks of his wife in my mind, I was certain that life was not promised. Not for Ken, not for Bryan, not for Mumzee, not for my Aunt Tamy, my step dad Boots, my brother Ricky and certainly, not for a 34 year old me. A human on this planet with the same fate as the rest of us. We don't make it out alive.

Later, after watching Damsel, a pleasure to my husband who had been waiting at least a week for me to cave into a movie, I came back into the RV from the house, the baby crying and the two men in a standstill. Both of them staring intensely at one another, unwilling to budge from the hypothetical 3 foot hole they were both standing in. Eventually Banjo apologized to a silent Jethro and climbed out of the hole he helped dig and disappeared for what felt like an hour. Jethro finally popped his head out from his bed space that lay under ours and I casually, sweetly and calmly told him that one day he would understand that the possession of material items will one day no longer be a concern and that his relationship with his little sister will be the biggest treasure of them all. That "his" necklace around her neck will be something he loves… that I strive to have much less and look forward to just that, because it is all so much a burden now. One day that necklace might belong to someone because we have all left this world, we can only hope that we lived our lives fully, instead of fighting over such things as these possessions. He stared like a deer in headlights. For the first time I didn't judge. I didn't assume I knew what he was thinking. I didn't feel as though he wasn't listening or doing something wrong. I noticed he was still in his day clothes and I didn't tell him to get out of them before going to sleep. I just went to hug him and for the first time in a long time, I let him hug me until he went slack, letting me know he was done with his hug. I shut off the lights and lay down. Not a minute later, 7 fingers popped up and I could barely see them in the glow of Jazzlyn's GlowWorm's guts, Guts we call it. As I come upon the 7 fingers I recognize he is wanting me to wake him up at 7 so he doesn't miss his cartoons. I greet his 2 with the tips of my peace sign and say, "I'll wake you up at 7." His hand stays up and I meet it with mine.

While Jazzlyn nursed and caressed my torso under the glow of guts, her fairy lights from her nook twinkle in the distance enough for me to fully take in my surroundings, and Jethro's hand falls for the 2nd of 3 times before he finally had enough weight about him to take him to another world, I am reminded of something Uncle David said in an interview with Staeci Whitehouse. "We live in this practice life, preparing for real life, then we are living in real life, and we realize there was never really a transition between the two lives, and it was all just the same life." I think I'm ready to live in real life now and stop trying to create some life of fantasy, I'm already living a fantasy. I can be happy now.

Tomorrow, I will drink more water and take more deep breaths.

[silentdivasblog]

Lady of The Day 🌹 Aida Overton Walker ❤️

[mywifeleftme]

319: Gilbert Bécaud // Incroyablement

Incroyablement Gilbert Bécaud 1959, Pathé

The first clip that came up when I searched “Gilbert Bécaud 1950s” opens with the pomaded chanteur in the midst of hurling himself down a curved marble banister. He narrates the slide with a high-pitched grunt of exertion, like Mario nailing a wall jump, hits the floor, bounces, and trots without pause over to a piano in the adjoining room where he begins miming his motormouthed hit “Incroyablement.” It’s clear from the closeups that he really can play the hell out of a piano, but he also gets so caught up in mugging for the camera that he just starts gesticulating with both hands, leaving the instrument to fend for itself. The clip (from 1959’s Croquemitoufle) ends with Bécaud taking a blind leap backwards and landing in the arms of a puzzled dude in a pompous hat who’s walked in on the end of the performance. In the next one I clicked, Bécaud hurriedly tramps through the snow with the cadence of a vintage windup toy and jumps over a stone wall. In the next, he wanders on stage whipping his head worriedly left and right until he locks onto the camera and zooms toward it, a grin of dog-like relief splitting his face. I go on: Bécaud playing air-violin. Bécaud looking much more comfortable dancing like a marionette than embracing Brigitte Bardot.

When I asked girlfriend of the podcast and intrepid French-language correspondent Mea to give me one of her capsule reads on Bécaud (see my Félix Leclerc review), she demurred, saying she didn’t know enough about him, and that relative to contemporaries like Aznavour, Gainsbourg, Brel, et al he’d been “left behind in his era” as she put it. As to why that was, she didn’t exactly know either, but passed along a quote from a La Presse writeup on his career: “Next to tortured geniuses happy men look like imbeciles.” Elton John is proof enough that it doesn’t take an intellectual to write great tunes on the piano, but it must be said: for a man who seemed most comfortable playing the lovable goofball, Bécaud and his various lyricists composed a body of classic songs that compares well to that of any of his contemporaries, much of it imaginative, sophisticated, and touched with genuine poetry.

Incroyablement is a 1959 Canadian compilation that captures a young Bécaud already established as a reliable hitmaker and one of France’s premiere live attractions (hence his nickname, “Monsieur 100,000 volts”), yet still on the cusp of his greatest successes. In some ways Bécaud’s zany physicality anticipated the vibrant energy of rock music, but it also hearkened back to the way singers approached the stage before the advent of the electric microphone. In vaudeville and music hall performers were free to roam, but the microphone rooted them in place, forcing them to narrow the focus of their energy into the temperamental metal appliance mounted to its pole. To paraphrase the aforementioned La Presse article, other singers of Bécaud’s generation stood like trees, but he was a bird in constant motion. He was forever darting away from the mic, like a child who notices his guardian’s attention has wandered, to pound away at his piano or goof with the band or clasp hands with his audience.

I prefer Incroyablement to the later Bécaud compilation in my collection (1968’s Les titres d’or de Gilbert Bécaud) because youth suits him. On “La cruche” he raps about drunken scenes at a bar over zippy hot jazz chords; on “Alors raconte” (“So, Tell Me”) it’s Bécaud who sounds tipsy, telling a shaggy dog story about a woman to an impetuous chorus of whistling oglers; on “Marie, Marie,” a dreamy acoustic ballad, he plays the role of a nebbishy librarian pining over a girl among the stacks. And could he suffer? He could suffer! On “Les croix,” his first hit, he plucks at the heart strings like a master, enumerating the crosses of ruins, convents, and hope chests before revealing his own burden:

And me, poor me I have my cross in my head The immense lead cross Vast as love I hang the wind there I hold back the storm I spend the evening there And I hide the day there And me, poor me I have my cross in my head A word is engraved there Which sounds like “suffering” But this familiar word Let my lips repeat Is so heavy to carry That I think I'll die

Hell yeah man. All of these poses, the melodramatic and the comedic, are ones he’d continue to play till the very end, but it’s all a bit cuter before the cigarettes put a rasp in his voice and he gets that Engelbert Humperdinck bouffant thing going on that makes his head look as wide as it is tall.

If you’re an Anglophone like me, you’re not going to pick up these lyrical specifics without doing some research, but the thing about Bécaud is that he’s so expressive, an artist of such broad gesture, that you really can kinda get the gist of what he’s up on vibes alone. If you’ve any fondness for chanson, or even your Tony Bennett / Dean Martin / Sammy Davis Jr. type crooners, you’ll have a blast with this guy. To quote La Presse’s Stéphane Laporte one more time, “Suffering does not have a monopoly on life: happiness also has its share.” Gilbert had plenty of it on offer.

319/365

[bixels]

"Pinkie" and Thea (Twilight)!

Rosita Piedra (nicknamed Pinkie), Ponyville's favorite dancer, musician, festival-planner, baker-in-training, and vaudeville & burlesque performer! Her hyperactive energy's matched only by her love for the community.

Thea Sullivan, Ponyville's newest resident librarian and witch-in-training! She's as smart as a whip, with a tendency to fly off the handle at moments of high stress. Now if only she could get her nose out of a book long enough to make some friends...

[washingtonmarvel]

Trapeze artist, strongwoman, and all around badass Laverie Vallee, stage name Charmion, flexes for the camera in this (colorized) picture from around 1905. Born in 1875 in Sacramento, Charmion was a pioneer. She shocked conservative Victorian/Edwardian men with her daring "Trapeze Disrobing Act" (which was the subject of one of Thomas Edison's first films) and her insanely jacked body. But the ladies loved her, and her performances, which were viewed as practically pornographic by the extreme standards of the time period, were mostly attended by women. Throughout her career, she inspired women to exercise and to free themselves of the restrictions society placed on them. Charmion criticized the prudish attitudes of the time and told women they could be just as strong as men (this was a radical claim for that era, but her own body was the proof). A brilliant woman, she was fluent in six languages and regularly lectured and wrote newspaper articles about fitness. She was the highest-earning performer on the vaudeville circuit for much of her career, sometimes earning as much as $500 per week (equivalent to almost $20,000 today). Charmion was known to curl 70-pound dumbbells as part of her workout regimen and she could walk 12 miles without feeling fatigued. Charmion's biceps reportedly were almost exactly the same size as those of Eugen Sandow, who was widely considered the world's strongest man, and in a friendly sparring match she fought on an equal footing with the then-famous boxer Terry McGovern. She retired in 1912 and lived a quiet life outside the limelight until her death in 1949.

EDIT: I made a second post with some more info about Charmion if anyone's interested:

[justbusterkeaton]

“Thinking over that exciting childhood of mine, I must admit that one thing I missed while growing up was an ordinary school education. I was so succesful as a child performer that it occurred to no one to ask me if there was something else I'd like to do when I grew up.

If someone had asked me I would have said, "Civil engineer" I imagine I would have been a good one. But even fifty years ago you could not qualify for a degree with a one-day school education.

That's all I ever had: one day in school”

- Buster Keaton

[omgthatdress]

Few American writers and entertainers have managed to have careers as wild and scandalous as that of Mae West.

A vaudeville performer since childhood, she developed a distinctive sexy stage persona and signature sauntering walk that was inspired by the likes of Julian Eltinge and Bert Savoy.

In 1927, she opened her first play, Sex, which she both wrote and starred in. It centered around Margy, a high-end sex worker, and Clara, the stuck up society lady who was the mother of the man Margie falls in love with. Ticket sales were strong, but city officials were upset about the play's risqué content. West was eventually arrested, tried, and sentenced to ten days in jail for obscenity.

While incarcerated, she told reporters that she'd worn her silk panties in jail, instead of the "burlap" that was usually given to prisoners. The scandal of it all sent ticket sales through the roof.

Her next play was set to be even more controversial: it was called The Drag, and it had an entire cast of homosexuals. The end scene was a massive and spectacular drag ball. The show went for ten performances before it was shut down by police.

Police threatened to shut down all of Broadway if The Drag continued to be performed, so it was cancelled. However, a censored version with a now heterosexual protagonist called The Pleasure Man was allowed to perform a year later.

Eventually, West would make her way to Hollywood and become one of the most iconic stars of the 1930s.

In 2019, The Drag was performed for the first time in many decades at Gay City in Seattle, and has since then been performed several times across the U.S.