OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It's part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack and ambient-improv musician Dennis Rea.
THE NIGHT AFTER the "Save the Jem Studios" rally I've already written about, I went back to the building for the launch party of something called "Glamour Girls International."
The name was at least partly a misnomer. There were slightly more men than women among the 100 or so folks at the party; including one fab-looking drag queen, an Austin Powers impersonator, and a neo-pagan dude in orange body paint and a black loincloth (having seen some of the backstage preparation, I can assure you he was painted even where he wasn't showing).
The women, not to be undone or out-glammed, were all dolled up in an array of retro cocktail dresses, neo-Twiggy minidresses, Lewinsky black wigs, feather boas, and at least one authentic-looking hesher metal costume (complete with Twisted Sister T-shirt).
Besides the showing off and dancing and drinking and eating and chatting, there was a brief runway fashion show in which some of these glamour girls 'n' guys strutted their well-dressed stuff under some improvised spotlights. There was also much photography and videography, some of which involved a Barbie Polaroid camera.
The point of the party, besides dressing up and having fun? To launch further opportunities for dressing up and having fun.
Shannon Lindberg, the ceramics-and-glass artist who devised the event (under the pseudonym "Eva New Dawn"), wants to use the names and addresses she gathered at the event (and any income from selling people prints of the photos taken of them) in order to stage bigger, lovelier parties and fashion shows; and to eventually start a website and maybe even a print magazine. (The website will be at "glamourgirlsinternational.com"; the URL "glamourgirls.com" is already used by a soft-porn site.)
Lindberg told me she sees her Glamour Girls parties as a social movement, one that would reassert women's innate values and strengths after too many years of patriarchal society.
I saw the kickoff party as something only slightly less vital.
I saw it as reasserting the kind of funky, DIY glam that used to be the hallmark of Seattle bohemia in the years before three-story rave clubs with dot-com sponsorships and recessed lighting. The kind of glam you used to see at the old Vogue or Tugs Belltown. That was about making friends/lovers and being fabulous, not about making business contacts and being what NYC magazines thought was hot.
It's the kind of real beauty we need tons more of.
TOMORROW: Yes, it's still chicken.
IN OTHER NEWS: The Smoking Gun has uncovered that the mysterious title personage in the infamous Fox TV special Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire? is really an actor and "corporate comedian"--who was served with a restraining order back in '91 after an ex-fiancee made allegations of abuse.
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