progress on the prairie

Secretly, as a little country girl growing up in the middle of rural Oklahoma, I dreamed of becoming a big-city magazine editor by day and a bawdy burlesque performer by night. Burlesque was the antithesis of everything around me. There was no hay or open prairie or self-restraint or comfortable jeans or roadkill. It was all gluttony and lace and color and fun and sexuality and artifice and bigtop. It was the kind of spectacle I was taught to avoid. It was the kind of spectacle classy ladies didn’t even look at, much less participate in. This crazy idea was so secretly, privately tucked away in my mind that I didn’t even think on it too long for fear I would speak it. For fear I would do it.

As soon as I caught a glimpse of a model such as this:

or this:

I had to turn away. The fire, the life, the audacity was too much for my virgin mind to handle.

It is really no wonder, then, that my soiled adult mind has been obsessing over burlesque of late; I can’t stop staring. I can’t stop fantasizing. I’m like some insecure politician’s wife who has been on a silly diet her whole life and can’t stop eating Twinkies when she’s alone, in her closet.

It’s all so yummy! And, if burlesque is my naughty Twinkie, the cream filling is Molly Crabapple’s art:

And, OH! the things I would do, the lengths I would go to for one of her books:

Listen to her life story here, her self-described rise from “low-rent nude model” to empress of her own art empire titillatingly named Dr. Sketchy’s Anti Art School. Come one, come all! Get lost with me in endlessly fascinating details of nipples and bulge…

Spring