It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, no it was just Freakshow Wrestling, an insane, nonstop parade of comedy show meets sideshow meets wrestling.  Freakshow Wrestling had me laughing, shaking my head and cringing all evening.

Dr. Paul Koudounaris invited me and once I heard there was something called Freakshow Wrestling, I knew I had to go.  So I found myself waiting in line outside a shady warehouse in Sun Valley, California last Saturday night.  Everyone in line stepped aside for a man with long hair, dark messy face paint, a multi-hued ensemble including a yellow tie, tattoo sleeves, and mismatched striped socks.  He disappeared for a few moments, came back and said, “I did not just pee in that alley” and reentered the building.

I told the oversized clown handling tickets that I was “just one,” but that my friend was already inside so I wasn’t sure I needed a seat.  He replied, “I find it hard to believe you have any friends.” Ouch.  Semi-witness to an act of public indecency and dissed by a clown.  The evening was already living up to its weird expectations.

The makeshift arena with its random assortment of chairs and benches surrounding a wrestling ring was packed.

I’ve never been to a live wrestling event, so I can’t be sure, but I don’t think they usually go like this.  A magician followed up a fire illusion with a bout in the ring.  An extra curvy lady had dollar bills stapled to her bare ass cheek.  Two elaborately costumed and noisy rock bands traded insults.  And a black Santa and an overweight Jesus pummeled each other.

Here is a video of the Ghost of MachoMan and Mathimatico Dos facing off in a  Last Man Dancing challenge (Ghost of MachoMan does an awesome impression of old-school wrestlers’ voices):

Two bands, RoseMary’s Billy Goat and Radioactive Chicken Heads, goaded each other in a bizarro battle of the bands.  I preferred RoseMary’s Billy Goat who had a song with the chorus, “damn that girl’s got hobbit feet” (how can you not love that?) and a fiery guitar.  Here’s a video of RoseMary’s Billy Goat:

The show was about two hours and at $10 a person, a huge value in terms of entertainment bang for your buck.  Thank you so much to Dr. Paul Koudounaris for inviting me! The next Freakshow Wrestling is coming up in Sun Valley, CA on Saturday, February 25, 2012. See their Facebook page for more information.

Years ago, a passport mixup led artist Christopher Ulrich to spend four days in a jail in Taipei.  Deprived of natural light and air, Christopher spent a lot of his time drawing and was able to barter the drawings to the guards for contact with the embassy.  His art helped free him from the darkness in more ways than one.    Art’s ability to release its creators from darkness is one of its greatest powers.  All of the artists exhibiting in Hyaena Gallery’s current group show, Noir, which opened Saturday November 19, clearly grapple with shades of darkness.  Each piece, whether it was explicitly about dreams like Jeremy Cross’ A Hobo’s Death Dream, or not, shares a nightmarish quality.  The art becomes an outlet for haunting imagery.

And goth bless Hyaena for providing an arena for these visual exorcisms.  I feel so at home amongst the dreamy skeletons and monsters conjured up by the black theme and their creators.  While I didn’t meet any new artists, I did get to catch up with many of the usual suspects including artists Tatomir, Spinestealer, Clint Carney, Christopher Ulrich and Ron Whipple.

To see more of Noir, visit Hyaena Gallery through November 30 or look on their website.

With a rich history of showcasing the best in fringe and lowbrow art, Los Angeles art gallery La Luz de Jesus has been celebrating their 25th anniversary for the last two months.  Each month’s show has featured more than a hundred new pieces by well-known luminaries in the Southern California art scene.  Thursday November 3, I was fortunate enough to be included in the La Luz de Jesus 25 part 2 preview opening for artists and press. While artists including Mark Ryden, Wayne Martin Belger, The Pizz, and Krystopher Sapp passed around the companion book, La Luz de Jesus 25: The Little Gallery That Could, for signatures, I collected photographs and felt starstruck.

Happy Birthday La Luz de Jesus and congratulations to all the artists involved in both shows! You can see Part 2 in the gallery through November 27. Visit the La Luz de Jesus website for more information or to see previews.

By Halloween night, Megan, Hope and I had been wicked geishas at Miss Kitty’s Electrosex party, posed as Victorian Mourners at Heritage Village, visited the Tim Burton special exhibit at the LACMA Muse Ball, screamed until our throats were raw at Universal Halloween Horror Nights and even snuck in some Los Angeles sight-seeing and random shenanigans.  But we weren’t done celebrating my favorite holiday of the year yet.  For our final night out we chose to go to 3Clubs in Hollywood to the Monday Night Trick or Tease Halloween Burlesque Party.

While a lot of time and care went into our costumes for Friday and Saturday night, by Monday night, we had sort of run out of steam and threw hot looks together on a shopping expedition Monday afternoon to Santee Alley in downtown LA where we splurged on corsets.

Monday Night Tease is a weekly burlesque review.  For Halloween, performers including Lili Vonschtuff, April Showers, Anastasia Von Teaserhausen, Vixen Magdalene, Dizzy Von Damn!, Tasseled Squirrel, Miss Angie Cakes, Glama Sutra and Wolfgang Wolfwhistle drew inspiration from classic horror and pop culture references such as Elvira, Jurassic Park and True Blood.  The numbers were really creative and entertaining.

Photography of the performers is prohibited, and while I may have been granted an exception if I’d bothered to ask, I’d been carefully photographing almost every moment of the weekend up until that point.  And for Halloween night, I just wanted to enjoy the moment.

The Tulsa Skull Swingers played a fun set and I liked their skull masks and sexy sparkling skeleton go go dancers on stage.  See the video clip below.

Trick or Tease was the perfect end to our Halloweekend 2011 extravaganza!  I want to thank Megan and Hope for coming out from the East Coast to party.  The weekend wouldn’t have been nearly as epic without them.

Sunday October 30 Megan, Hope and I went to Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights. As pretty young women we seem to have targets painted on our faces for the cast. It doesn’t help that we’re all shriekers. Well, Megan and Hope are shriekers, most of the time I’m laughing maniacally because I just delight in all the creepiness. But the zombies, clowns and monsters really gun for us and will often swarm us in large groups and follow us as we squirm.

Once we scampered through the first scare areas, we started with the Terror Tram which was Scream themed this year. Dropping visitors into the heart of the backlot, the Terror Tram allows you to interact with poorly-lit sets from Universal films such as War of the Worlds and Psycho. The Ghostface Killer from Scream kept popping out from rooms in the Bates Motel. I’m not a Scream fan and I find that villain to be more silly than scary so I was more creeped out by the darkness and the soundtrack of a shrieking woman. But my favorite part of the backlot is the Bates house from Psycho. When we went in 2009, a Norman Bates was posing for pictures on the front steps and the area was a sort of no-scare zone. So as we turned the corner to the house, my guard was completely down. I was excitedly talking about the history of the house and gesturing at an upper story window where Mother Bates could be seen in her rocking chair. As I turned to face Megan and Hope I was met with a knife pointed centimeters from my nose attached to the arm of a sinister grinning Norman Bates. It was such a startling sight that I screamed and nearly wet my pants. Megan and Hope were almost on the ground laughing. They let him get to me completely unawares and it was my biggest scare of the whole night. I need new friends. The kind of friends who don’t let Norman Bates stab me in the face.

Next we took a break from the horror with the Bill and Ted’s Excellent Halloween Adventure live show. The show parodies pop-culture moments of the year, includes hot dance numbers with half-naked performers and is generally hilarious. This year’s show poked fun at Osama Bin Laden, Twilight, Pirates of the Caribbean, Black Swan, Sucker Punch and Canada among many other things. All the celebrity impersonators are well-cast. My favorite moment was when Pirates of the Caribbean’s Blackbeard motor-boated Tyler Perry’s Big Mama’s oversized chest just a few feet in front of us during the finale dance-sequence. Insanity!

The first maze we did was Alice Cooper’s Welcome to My Nightmare. It was AWESOME! The scenes progressed disjointedly like a child’s nightmare, borrowing images from Alice Cooper’s life and work like his childhood bedroom, his makeup, and an electric chair. I liked the guillotine area where a french-garbed Cooper look-a-like stilt walker rushed out at visitors and stormed through the room.

As a bit of a girly homicidal maniac myself, my favorite maze was La Llorona: Villa De Almas Perdidas. The story goes that a violent mother drowned her children in the river so that she could be with the man she loved. When he rejected her she drowned herself. Her ghost roamed the earth hunting for more young souls to join the others. The maze had one room where you walked on a bridge overlooking children’s bodies floating face down in eerie water. It was the stuff of the best nightmares. There were creepy stilt-walkers wearing animal skull masks and a butcher’s room with hanging pig carcasses you had to push through. And at the very last moment, a ghastly La Llorona herself took us by surprise and we bolted.

The Wolfman The Curse of Talbot Hall is built over a year-round House of Horrors attraction. While you’re waiting in line it’s fun to look at classic posters of Universal Horror films and see castings of iconic faces including Alfred Hitchcock and Vincent Price. The maze had a very classic gothic feel. With howling wolves and foggy Victorian-looking surroundings, most of the set looked like early horror movies. But it was really jarring to see a case of Chucky dolls, which is part of the regular attraction, but doesn’t fit the Wolfman theme in the slightest. This maze had the shortest line of the night and I’ve heard other people complain about it, but we had a good time with the atmosphere of classic scare scenes.

Finally we went through Rob Zombie’s House of 1,000 Corpses in 3D zombie vision. As a huge Rob Zombie fan I was pretty excited about this maze though I wasn’t sure how I’d like the 3D effects. The 3D wasn’t that noticeable. It was mostly garish clown colored popping lights on areas of Dr. Spaulding’s. I could’ve taken or left it. But I loved seeing Dr. Murder, Baby sawing through a flailing man’s skull, and the victims in pink bunny suits tied up and hung from the ceiling. Actually at this point in the night we were practically zombies ourselves. We’d been on our feet for most of the last seven hours. I wanted to spend more time in this environment to soak it in.  Too bad I couldn’t spend the night.

The lines were so long that we did not make it to The Thing or Hostel mazes before closing even though we got to the park right when it opened. I wish the park would limit attendance a bit so that regular ticket holders could do all the mazes. Looking at the board most of the night, lines for everything were forty-five minutes to an hour and a half. It’s an unreasonable amount of waiting time and really cuts down on the adrenaline of the mazes when you’re standing bored for an hour before you’re scared again. Anyway, we had a great time, I just wish we could have spent less time in line and more time in the mazes.

Universal does a great job creating these wonderful settings that each feel like a little world of horror.  And it’s the closest I can get to accessing some of my favorite movie lands.  Since the designers have probably got a little time before they need to start building next year’s mazes, perhaps they’d like to come decorate my apartment.

After all the yelling and peals of raucous laughter I completely lost my voice.  And as we walked back to the car we realized it was officially Halloween.

For our second night of Halloweekend festivities, Saturday, October 29 we attended the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s annual Halloween party, the Muse Costume Ball.  Held at the museum, the event featured live performances, entrance to the special Tim Burton exhibit and some small interactive art installations.

Megan and Hope dressed as the Black Swan and the White Swan transitioning into the Black Swan from the movie Black Swan.  They went all out with dramatic makeup, red contact lenses, beautiful feathered tutus and headpieces.  They looked spectacular.

I was a vampire countess in a PVC ball gown and a bat wing neck corset.

I was really looking forward to this event, but it was a bit of a let-down. We had fun because that’s what we do. We’re not going to go out and have a bad time. We’ll find ways to entertain ourselves. But it wasn’t a particularly well-run party.  There wasn’t enough to do.  There were two main areas and after a short time in each area we felt like we had done it.  The first was the museum’s entrance courtyard.

Shortly after arrival we caught part of musical ensemble Killsonic’s performance in the courtyard.

I enjoyed Killsonic.  I thought they had a fun dark energy.  But after a few songs Hope was ready to move on and see a different area.  If I had realized how starved I’d be for entertainment later, I would’ve insisted on watching them longer.

The second area designated for the Ball was a rooftop patio attached to a couple of party rooms at one end of the complex.  But there was no clear indication where the second area was so we had to ask after some confused wandering (signs people).  The band She Wants Revenge was finishing a set when we got up to the rooftop patio.  We didn’t see any other acts in that area the rest of the night.  There were some bars and tons of people mingling around.  They could have played music and had dancing out there, or featured more bands or other live acts, but they didn’t.

Inside one of the party rooms they were repeating the songs Shout and Harry Belafonte’s Day-O over and over.  I have no idea why.  Once you danced to each of those songs once you felt like it was time to go.  In that same room there was a troupe of dirty weirdos wearing burlap masks and carrying bizarre props like sunflowers and empty water jugs.  I assume they were considered entertainment, but we found them unpleasant.  One shoved a sunflower in my face and said, “What’s your name then?” so I replied, “Dahlia” which led to “Is that right?” so I answered yes and then he immediately repeated “What’s your name then?” and began the whole sequence of inanity again.  Once I said my name was Alice to see if the routine would change and he said “Is that right?” and I said no and he said “What’s your name then?”  He repeated this over and over.  Is that supposed to be funny?  Get away from me.  And at one point later in the evening a live act with singers and musicians came on that stage, but they were painful to listen to.

I suppose the Museum puts a curb on dancing to limit rowdiness, but there wasn’t enough other entertainment and the event felt rather stuffy, stifled, boring (especially since the party the night before had such great energy and constant stimulation).

I enjoyed seeing the Tim Burton exhibit one more time, but the main attraction was simple people watching.

I made a game out of trying to find Tim Burton inspired costumes.

Hope, Megan and I had fun at this event, but I don’t think I would go to it again. There are too many other great Halloween parties in Los Angeles and the organizers should make a better effort to keep party-goers entertained and engaged.

Saturday, October 30, 2011, Heritage Square Museum hosted its eighth annual Halloween and Mourning Tours. With eight historic buildings relocated from different areas of Los Angeles and painstakingly restored, entering Heritage Square is like stepping back in time to the late nineteenth century.  During the Halloween and Mourning Tours, each building has exhibits and presentations about mourning customs of the period. We witnessed re-enactments including a funeral procession, a seance with a suspiciously successful medium, and discussed commissioning a coffin for Megan with a coffin builder.

To fit in with the mourning theme, Megan and Hope raided my closet and I wore a new Victorian-inspired suit I sewed.  We enjoyed taking pictures and meeting some of the other costumed guests.  It was a relaxed and enjoyable event.

To learn more about Heritage Square, visit their website.