A sign hangs on the door of Gotham City Video, one of the places McClear used to work.
Photo by Bjorn Roche

I wouldn't have been able to identify author Sheila McClear as she walked in for our interview if I hadn't already seen her photo on the back of her new book, The Last of the Live Nude Girls. Tall and slender, with straight brown hair that breaks against pale, almost translucent skin and green eyes framed by glasses, 30 year old Michigan native Sheila McClear looks more like a bookish intellectual than a former peep show dancer. 

McClear, who is the daughter of two lawyers and holds a college degree in theater and costume design from the University of Michigan, was unable to find steady work after moving to New York City. "Like many college graduates, I actually had very few marketable skills," McClear reflects in her book. Going by the name of Chelsea, the first neighborhood where she had ever danced, McClear began performing at several different live peep shows at age 25 before retiring about a year and a half later to work as a full-time writer for Gawker. (McClear is now a features reporter for the New York Post.)

Eva and Her Virgins

    A performance by Eva and Her Virgins is as evocative for the theatrical antics and energy of its band members as it is for the luster of its dark electronic pop sound. Playful, gritty, histrionic, and sexy, Eva and Her Virgins is a band that you want to keep your eye on.

    I was excited to chat with front woman Emily Powers about the band, where we also discuss time travel, superpowers, and using Beethoven’s body as a flotation device.

 Meet Alex, the teenager I always wanted to be when I was a teenager. Actually, scratch that; at *censored* years of age, I still want to be like Alex, the fourteen year old rock star heroine of Joyce Raskin’s new book My Misadventures as a Teenage Rock Star. Through playing music, Alex gains a strong sense of self-empowerment and identity, making Misadventures a positive model for women both young and old. Just as importantly, Misadventures is fun to read – in fact, I read it straight through without putting it down.
The book also inspires curiousity about its author, Joyce Raskin, who is a rock star in her own right, playing in the band Scarce. Here’s what she has to say to Chicktellectual.com about being a teenage girl, rock star and risk-taker.

Maya Erdelyi-Perez

From ice sculpting at the Ice Hotel in the Arctic to staging renegade fashion shows in the Paris subway system, the life of New York born artist Maya Erdelyi-Perez is not unlike one of her own surreal animated films.  On the eve of shooting a new music video, Maya chats with me about illegal subway spectacles, collaborating with band No Surrender and Tunde Adebimpe from TV on the Radio and her upcoming exhibit this Saturday night.

Dames Aflame costume designer Stephanie Ludwig (Left) and director Shannon Newton (Right)
photo by Jimiflix

Interview with Dames Director Shannon Newton Plus Photos and Video

My friend, who agreed to speak with me about burlesque on terms of anonymity, recently came back from Atlanta with stars in his eyes and a newfound passion for the South.  None of us really got it until he told us about the Dames Aflame burlesque show that he had caught during his travels:

"You know I think New York women are hot.  And New York burlesque dancers are really hot, just not, well... beauty queen hot.  The Dames Aflame dancers are beauty queen hot.  All of them.  They appeal to men in the way that strippers do.  Which is why, in New York, you go to see naked women at a strip club if you're a man.  In Atlanta, you can go to a strip club — or you can go see a Dames Aflame show."

I  was curious and so I contacted Shannon Newton, who runs the Dames Aflame Dancers in Atlanta.  In a phone interview that felt more like a backstage pass, I got her to give me the inside scoop on why even mega-corporations think that her show is a stand-out.

Interview with Burlesque Superstar Angie Pontani

Seattle residents don't miss Angie and Murry Hill with the legendary Dita von Teese, Tomorrow Night, Wednesday April 1st at 7pm at the Triple Door.

"This is Burlesque" Star Angie Pontani
Photo by Dale Haris

From the first brick laid at the saloon, women – straight, gay and miscellany – have expressed curiosity about what goes on in entertainment venues where other women get naked. But while strip clubs may host a sprinkling of adventurous female patrons, burlesque shows can claim at least half – if not a majority – of women in their audience.

It’s Saturday night and I’m seated at “This is Burlesque,” one of the hottest tickets in the New York burlesque circuit and hosted in the intimate, sensual environs of Soho’s Corio eatery. The energy is as raucous as you would expect even if the patrons are not what you imagined: immediately behind me a decked-out bachelorette party glitters like a Christmas tree, and on every side women cheer the performers on while their dates – mostly men – look on with more quiet appreciation.  On the line to the ladies’ after the show, a modestly dressed woman in her twenties confesses: “This is one of my favorite things to do on a date. It’s much more original than the dinner and a movie thing. Plus you get to see if the guy knows how to have fun.”

She did seem interested,
from his point of view.

 Maybe she's sick of those artist types.  Sometimes they call the next day, sometimes they do it twice or even three times, but most don't.  He looks like the type who will call.  And call again. And maybe he won't be as boring as he looks.  No, he probably will be, but he'll be someone to write back home about so they know she's not as lonely as they think she is.

All the cool kids got their launching licenses at 16.  The really precocious ones, the ones who smelled like private school cardigans and clove cigarettes, they were launching at 15.  She had privately dared on 15 but the mission was aborted when the dorm mistress caught her sneaking out of her room with a stolen spacesuit.  Somehow the time when the mere thought of heights made her dizzy had gone by in light years. Things had changed fast in launch school; by the time she was 14 she already knew that she would be a Maverick and not a Wingman.