Satan vs. the 60's

Well, we decided to go to Beerland last night to see the dance-off between Satan's Cheerleaders and the Boom Chica Boom Girls for the owner's birthday. Burlesque has come back and it's not only not disappearing but expanding. Neither troupe could really be called burlesque dancers, but are more properly offshoots of that sort of thing. Of course, Satan's Cheerleaders were around long before this rise in popularity for burlesque. They started off parodying high school football cheerleaders by doing cheers for Satan at Flametrick Subs shows and sort of took off on their own. This was an opportunity for them to do more than dance behind the Flametrick Subs and they took full advantage, dancing to everything from psychobilly to hip-hop to industrial music. They were adorable and fantastic.
The Boom Chica Boom Girls were just two go-go dancers and all they pretty much danced to were garage-pop from the 1960's, but I think the audience might have liked them a bit better. For one thing, garage-pop is more fun to listen to than industrial music. And since the audience was 90% male, I think it was just a sexual thing--most guys tend to go for the cute, clean-cut go go dancer thing over the slinky evil thing. But what do I know? And it's certainly not like these girls were all so clean-cut, considering that they were more skimpily dressed than the Cheerleaders and just as covered in tattoos.
Both troupes danced their asses off, and then joined together on the last song to pull Randall (the owner) on stage, tie him up, pull his shirt up to his neck and dance like a goober with a pitchfork in his hands. All in all, a fantastic time.
Burlesque and its ilk is way sexier and more fun than any boring strip club could ever be. The crowd is dancing and applauding, the dancers can actually dance and are having fun, and the clothes are silly and fun, instead of contrived semblances of supposed sexual fantasies. And since it's as much about dancing and music and fun as it is about sexual display, it's the sort of thing where men and women, straight and gay, can all hang out and have fun and get a bit turned on if they like. (Though I did hear one guy dressed as a woman complaining about the show, and I wanted to tell her that if she wanted to be a woman she better get used to being upstaged.)