LOVE IN THIS CLUB

Hello!

I’ve recently become a diet coke girl and I’m telling everyone. I can’t stop showing up 15 minutes late to an event, usually at a place that has a bar capable of serving diet coke, with my own can of the precious elixir.

And let’s just say mama needed her diet cokes for the three-wig-weekend she just had.

The best part of three-wig-weekend was Saturday’s 13 Love Songs, an outrageous show put on by the geniuses of Hot Kitchen Collective! I first saw this show a few years ago at Color Club when my friend Kristi Durkin asked me to be an oompa loompa and shoot a giant fake syringe of insulin into their ass while “Pour Some Sugar on Me” played. It was amazing. And I was so pumped to be asked to do this year’s 10th anniversary show.

How the show works: 13 performers get assigned a song and they can do whatever they want with it as long as it results in a 5-7 minute live performance and there’s no full nudity.

Before we get into it, please do the homework and watch our full performance.

Alien in This Club by the numbers:

Total run throughs with full cast: 1 at 7:30pm day of show (the show started at 9pm)

Total time occupying the Chicago Athletic Association bathroom painting our bodies: 2.5 hours

Total time sewing costumes: ~11 hours

Total $$ spent: $320

Total times I said “I know I’m spending a lot on this but it will be worth it”: 485

It took us about a month to choreograph, rehearse, build, and sew everything. I got asked to be in the show on February 14 and I immediately texted Kari and Elena (my two favorite dance collaborators) and said MARK YOUR CALENDARS GIRLS, WE GOT A GIG. We tossed around a few different concepts: all of them involving some giant cardboard monster. Eventually we came up with the story that a smooth-talking, kinda creepy astronaut (played by the incomparable Max Nutter) landed on a distant planet to discover a group of gorgeous, 80s, fembot-esque aliens who can only move in a big group (they are nearsighted). The aliens are obviously horny for the astronaut and do a dance to impress him, only to get so horny from their own dance that they form into a giant alien with tentacles that we have nicknamed “Big Mama.”

Choreo

I have been working with Kari and Elena a lot recently on weird little dance numbers and I am constantly in awe of their choreography skills and creativity. Not to get too corny in the newsletter, but do you ever feel like your friends are the smartest, funniest, most interesting people on the planet? Over the last few year I have found such a stunning team of collaborators and I feel so lucky. 

SO, that’s all to say that Kari and Elena pretty much choreographed everything. Most of my contribution during the choreo process was disrupting rehearsal by talking about how I need to shave my bush because it keeps puffing out my leotard.

Makeup

I have always shied away from makeup because I am lazy, but I really wanted to look like a gorgeous alien. In so many of my shows I am in a Temple Grandin wig with a stupid little drawn on mustache, so I forced myself to watch a bunch of YouTube videos of cosplayers highlighting and contouring.

Here’s a closer look at some of our makeup.

Some product highlights:

• We got sooo many compliments on the vibrancy of our body paint. I cannot recommend Mehron’s water based matte shades enough. They are pricey, ($13.95 per 1.4 oz tub) but they are super easy to put on and we barely made a dent in the containers. Plus, it stayed on for 5+ hours and came off easy. I got Lime, Light Pink, Sky, and Purple. I just followed this video for application tips.

• As someone who never learned how to do makeup, Trixie’s video was also super helpful. I am obsessed with this Kryolan TV Paint Stick she recommends. I got it in white to uses as a highlighter.

• We painted the color on with disposable white makeup sponges, but it kinda took forever so I switched to a flat top kabuki brush that I picked up at Walgreens.

• And I covered everything with the cheapest setting powder I could find at the drug store and Urban Decay’s All Nighter setting spray that has truly been sitting in my medicine cabinet for a hundred years. I did a layer of setting spray after I put the green base on and then after I put the makeup on top of it.

Costumes

I already had my blue set from the Stairway to Stardom number I talked about in the last newsletter, but it was still ambitious to make four full costumes for a one-night-only performance. Thank god making that leotard chemically altered my brain in a way to make me love sewing on stretch fabric. The construction was pretty simple for the skirts, I just asked everyone’s waist measurement and kinda-used-that number/kinda-traced-some-skirts-I-had-already-made. Don’t get mad at me, but I didn't have time to finish the hems of some of the skirts so I just glued sequin and fur trim over the raw edges. 

The biggest hurdle was Brigid’s lime green costume. I feel like I nailed the shape of hers, but the bobbin thread kept getting tangled. And when I sorted out that, the double zigzag stitch I was using wasn’t lining up. You can see just how absolutely wretched the hems look. 

Eventually I read that cheap/old thread could be a problem and…some of my thread is from my moms stash that is older than me. So I upgraded to a Gutermann cotton thread and everything was fixed! My only complaint about the new thread is it sheds a lot and gets fuzz all over my machine. Please let me know if you have thread recommendations. My next project is to make these dance bottoms so I need to get my thread situation sorted out before then.

Props

Annaleigh made the four tentacles last summer for a fantasy-themed show we were in and I am so glad I snagged them after the show because they have been used in so many alt-comedy bits around this city. The beautiful thing about making a huge, niche prop is that people will write bits around that huge niche prop.

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I made the big alien head out of scrap cardboard. I just attached a little piece of velcro on the back so we could unhinge her jaw and eat Max at the end. And the gloves/tongue are just two pieces of pink scrap fabric I had lying around. We are so lucky Kari knew how to do that weird arm thing at the end that she learned from a Justin Bieber music video. You never know what talents your friends will have <3

What I’m looking forward to:

• Tyler’s EP release show tonight at The Annoyance

• Having the most relaxing weekend of my life after the aforementioned 3-wig-weekend. I’m going to Beth’s yoga class on Saturday and I’m the guest monologist on the Saturday Show at 8pm @ LSI.

• I’m playing Samantha Jones in Mina’s Sex and the (Windy) City reading at Cafe Mustache on Monday, March 31.

• Lucky Cloud’s album release show at Schubas on April 5.

• I saw Penis Envy perform on 13 Love Songs and it was electric. I’m kinda thinking I might just be a freak and comb through their insta all weekend.

• Drinking a diet coke with a slice of pizza.

• I think I’m going to make this dress for my friend’s wedding in October

Next Issue: I’m going to do something weird and talk about my boyfriend, Derek. He is my tech guy/videographer/clip editor/driver/the wind beneath my wings and I wouldn’t be able to do half the stuff I do without him. His birthday is April 2 so what the heck let’s do a newsletter for DEREK.

Thanks for reading and, as always, don’t tell me about any typos unless they are really bad.