Geek Burlesque in the Katacombes of Doom!

About a month ago I went to see a burlesque show. It turns out that the girl who's the head of these shows is an acquaintance of a few of my friends. We got in touch and it turns out she was at it again. This time she was doing a special show with a geek theme. I got a chance to go and see it last Sunday with a friend of mine and it was nowhere else than... the Katacombes! You know, that heavy metal place turned weird hipster 80's turned heavy metal again? Here are some pics from last summer.

So I got to see the inside of that place after all. It's a bit of a small concert venue, but with a pretty bad ass feel with fake skulls and bones and tons of metal and pictures of evil dead things. Though maybe not as bad ass as the heavy metal / punk rock bar les Foufounes Électriques. (That's French for the Electric Buttocks.) Still, it was a cool place. I managed to get a shot of the place before the show started. It was pretty dark in there and a flash would've been useless, but here goes.

As you can (or can't) see, there are two floors. The ground and the mezzanine. The place was packed, but we were able to find a spot upstairs. So many people showed up for this show. And as it turned out, there were other burlesque performers from Ottawa, Toronto and even Japan that were there, and not just in the show itself, but in attendance as well. My friend and I had a conversation with one Velma Candyass who actually invited us to attend her show this Friday. If I remember correctly, we were watching movie clips on a screen before the show started and we got her attention when we were discussing Quentin Tarantino's foot fetish while watching a scene from Dusk Til Dawn where an exotic dancer played by Salma Hayek puts her foot in none other than Tarantino's mouth himself and pours liquor down her leg and into his mouth.

Shortly after the show started. We got the chance to see performances by Lulu les belles mirettes, Sucre à la crème, Lady Josephine and Cherry Typhoon among others. They put up a great show with sketches inspired by Mortal Kombat, The Legend of Zelda, Batman, Terminator, V for Vendetta, The X Files, Star Trek, etc. It was great! The people that put this together had a lot of imagination. There was also a live performance by a band that named itself after the original comic book gang, Archie, who played Sugar Sugar. Overall this was a great burlesque show and was tons of fun to watch.

Lulu les belles mirettes will soon be at another show with a group called Sublimes Rondeurs. The show is called Le Cabaret des Bombes - Hello Sailor at the cabaret Café Cleopatra.

While writing this and finding all the links to the places and performers, I realized that Montreal had a pretty big group of burlesque performers and a lot more shows than I expected. And a lot of, um, shall we say, alternative shows and parties occur at the cabaret Café Cleopatra which seems to have established itself for this sort of thing. So if you have an "alternative" lifestyle, I assume you already know about this. I learn something new about my own city almost every time I write these things.