A visit to a Chicago sex summit and how to get through the Canada-US border

This morning I received a message from Anna Smith, this blog’s occasional Canadian correspondent, who lives on a boat in Vancouver.

I felt I should share it.

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Anna looks back on her recent trip visiting a Chicago Virgin

I am back from Chicago.

I was there for four days to help initiate the first North American Sex Worker Summit.

Sex workers (including strippers) are technically not allowed to enter the United States because of our moral turpitude, whatever that means.

Fortunately, Richard Branson doesn’t seem to have a problem with that, so we stayed in his hotel – The Chicago Virgin – where we sat in a spacious conference room around an enormous table which was decorated with flags of the United States, Canada and the United Nations. The standard blue and white United Nations flags had the words United Nations of Sex Workers added to the bottom. We discussed problems and defined policy for the North American region of the international Network of Sex Work Projects.

There are many problems. The United States currently has the 12th highest rate of AIDS infection in the entire world, ahead of most countries in Africa and Asia. Sex workers have always been on the leading edge of disease prevention, not only practicing safer sex, but producing films, performing at benefits, educating medical professionals, students and youth and doing outreach work including distributing condoms, lube and safe injection supplies where needed. I have done all of those things. Shockingly, in the United States

Anna with one of her editors at the Virgin hotel

The hotel was lovely: a 26-storey former office tower. It now has a rooftop bar with an encircling patio and other fashionable bars and restaurants interspersed throughout the building with a spa in the basement.

In the homey coffee shop, I glanced through a little book of photos called Horrible London. While I sat at the coffee bar looking out the window, the Cream song Tales of Brave Ulysses was playing on a record player and that made me feel happy because it reminded me of my friend, dear Martin Sharp, who wrote the lyrics and I knew it would have made him happy that I heard them at that time when I was feeling a bit lonely, before the conference started.

I had been very concerned about crossing the border because, although I used to do that all the time as a dancer, I had not done it in a while.

A lawyer working for the conference had advised me not to bring my cell phone, high heels, lingerie or condoms or anything to indicate I was planning on having a good time – and under no circumstances was I to say I was going to attend a hookers’ convention. I felt a bit lost without the necessities of life and tried to figure out how to explain why I was going all the way to Chicago. Was it to just look at Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks painting? Why had someone else paid for my airfare and hotel?

Fortunately, I had visited a drop-in center for street girls a few days before my trip (there are no drop-in centers for boat girls). I was looking for some more normal clothing, since most of my clothes are either costumes or rags or a combination of both. I found a nice thin loose grey sweater, a cheap quilted pastel plaid vest and a bulky grey below-the-knee skirt. Best of all I met a capable, bright young lady with a shaved head and skin riddled with piercings and tattoos who told me the secret of crossing the border. She said she did it all the time.

Anna reflects on cross-border dress protocol

How, I wondered, did she get away with it? Surely she would have been detained for hours and scoured for drugs?

They held my sister for an hour – and she dresses in fine hand-woven fabrics and she’s an archaeologist (not my priest sister – she is totally fashionable).

My archaeologist sister is a textile conservator. Well I guess she does look a bit suspicious, because she often wears hand-made clothing rather like what they wore in the Middle Ages.

She’s in Colombia right now because the museum she works for sends her abroad to deliver artefacts because she is entirely trustworthy. She has to carry the artefacts in her hand luggage. If the artefacts are extremely valuable – like some beaten-up flag from an Arctic expedition – they send an armed guard to accompany her. If she has to use the toilet at an airport, the guard watches her luggage. Sometimes, because of the way she dresses, she gets mistaken for a Buddhist monk and that causes confusion, because Buddhist monks don’t usually have armed guards.

She says the rest of her work is bureaucratic and mostly tedious, but I think it’s great. She usually gets to listen to the CBC at work and she has a washing machine and ironing boards in her office. In the summertime, they sometimes park John Lennon’s yellow Rolls Royce in the lobby of the museum and put barriers around it so nobody can touch it. When this happens, my sister goes into a closet and fetches a special long duster that says Rolls Royce Only written on it by hand. She puts on white cotton gloves, slips under the barrier and she dusts each part of the exterior very modestly and precisely, almost like a dance. Japanese tourists especially like to watch her do the dusting.

Anyway, at The Chicago Virgin hotel, I was very, very well behaved and only used the sink for the purpose for which it was designed.

The Virgin Hotel shower sheep present from Richard Branson

I found a little sheep in the shower. I think it is a hotel thing. Someone did a study. A sheep in the shower. I heard some hotels put a doll on your bed, which would be revolting. The sheep I found to be mildly intrusive, but then I took it for a walk.

The main thing I bought in Chicago was crisps – a surprising request from a relative in Vancouver. He wanted foreign crisps.

I found the secret to crossing the Canada/US border is, when they ask the reason for your trip, to say: I am going to a Women’s Health Conference.

The immigration official will blanche and hurry you along without many more questions.

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As Cream’s Tales of Brave Ulysses was mentioned, here is a video on YouTube with annoyingly tinny vocals.

Comedian Luisa Omielan is targeting young girls, gays and Beyoncé fans

(A version of this piece was also published by India’s We Speak News)

Luisa Omielan after her show at the Comedy Cafe last night

Is there life after the Edinburgh Fringe for a Free Festival show by a relatively unknown comedian? Well, judging by last night, Yes.

I went to the first night of Luisa Omielan’s eight-week run at London’s Comedy Cafe Theatre and she got a standing ovation from a full house whooping for a show which had played to full houses and multiple 5-star reviews throughout the Edinburgh Fringe.

The show is called What Would Beyoncé Do?

“It’s about how Beyoncé songs have helped me,” Luisa told me last night. “How I think I should be a diva but it hasn’t quite worked out that way. I showcase Beyoncé songs to highlight how very different my life is to what Beyoncé has.”

My eternally-un-named friend saw the show with me. She (admittedly off-colour and with a possible ear infection) thought the pre-show music was much too loud. So did I. But, after the show, Luisa told me:

“It was to get the audience hyped. It’s not a show where you just sit down and don’t get involved. It’s very much a Yeeeaaahhhhh!!! Paaaarty!!!! show.”

She has performed in various shows at the Edinburgh Fringe for nine years, but What Would Beyoncé Do? was her debut solo show there and last night was her first ever full-length solo show in London.

The Beyoncé poster/flyer designed by Luisa

“From the first day in Edinburgh,” Luisa told me, “it had a full house of 12o people in the audience. About a week in, the fire brigade came and said: You can’t have this many people in the room! and they capped it at 75 and, after that, I was turning away maybe 20 or 30 people a night. They came because of the title and because I got listed as One To Watch and it was a good poster. Title and poster count for a lot.”

“You’ve done a lot of improv and been in other full-length shows at the Fringe,” I said to her. “You are very experienced. But doing a full-length solo show is different. Have you found it scary?”

“Yes,” she replied. “I cried twice before I went on tonight. Petrified. When I went to Edinburgh, I went completely by myself. I planned and dealt with every aspect of the show myself including the poster and the PR. But I was quite confident because I thought I’ve done the Fringe before. This’ll be fine. Whereas here tonight… I’ve never done a London show. I felt I had a lot to prove. There are 99 seats in the Comedy Cafe. How am I going to fill friggin’ 99 seats?

“But my Twitter followers went up by 400 during Edinburgh and, because it’s a free show (on the Free Festival/Free Fringe model) people feel ‘invested’ – they really support with the social media networking. So I’ve been using Facebook and Twitter to promote this show.”

“Are you an improviser or a stand-up?” I asked.

“I’m both” said Luisa firmly. “I see them both as my strengths, both as my art forms and I want a show which combines the two.”

“And you want to be an actress…” I said.

“No,” Luisa corrected me. “I want to be what you just saw. I’m doing what I want to be. I’ve never wanted to be anything else but a comedy performer, since I was about four or five. I did do acting at college (she studied Performing Arts) but my thing was always I wanted to be famous for being me. I wanted to be like Whoopi Goldberg or Robin Williams – where they’re a personality. Whoopi Goldberg gets booked as Whoopi Goldberg. I wanted that.”

“When I was watching the show,” I told Luisa, “I was impressed by the audience control.”

“Well,” she said, “over a year ago, I went to Chicago for three months, to the big improv school at Second City and studied clowning over there, which I loved. And clowning’s all about raising and lowering and raising… it’s all audience control.”

“You wanted to move there?” I asked.

“I would have done,” Luisa said. “If Edinburgh hadn’t gone well, my plan was to go back. But Edinburgh went amazing.”

“So you’re going back to Edinburgh again next year?”

“Yes, with the same show at the Free Festival.”

“The same show?” I asked.

Luisa singing – and dancing – at the Comedy Cafe last night

“Yes,” she replied. “Because this show is perfect for my target audience. The people who come to my comedy show are people that wouldn’t necessarily go to a comedy show normally. So there’s a lot of my target audience out there who need to know I exist.”

“And your target audience is…?” I asked.

“The young girls and the gays, because they identify with what I say and what I talk about.”

“You had a significant scattering of black people in that audience,” I said. “That’s strangely unusual in a normal comedy club, though I’ve never known why.”

“But that’s who I want to appeal to,” explained Luisa. “An urban crowd. Absolutely I want to appeal to that audience because it’s all-encompassing. The show is a party. In so many comedy shows you see the same old thing. I don’t fit into that environment. So I did my own thing and they came and, now I’ve found that niche, it’s very important that I build an audience and a following from the bottom up.”

“Where does that go if you’re stuck with young girls and gays?” I asked. “Doesn’t that mean you don’t hit the mainstream audience?”

“I think you’ll find they are the mainstream audience,” said Luisa. “If you get the girls and the gays, then the rest of the world follows.”

“Aren’t comedy audiences mainly young males, though?” I asked.

“People say they are, but there’s actually lots more women coming to comedy now and I want to try and encompass more women in comedy and get more women to go. You look at Jessie J or Beyoncé… Men didn’t pay for that. Women paid for that.

“Women pay for entertainment, not men. Men might pay for football. Women will decide what film you watch, where you go, what you go see. Women will decide that. Women are spending the money. This old men v women thing is bullshit. I have no time for that. Women will pay for a show. I want women in my show. End of. There’s no What about the men? Fuck ‘em. They’ve got Jongleurs. Go to that.”

“So Young heterosexual males piss-off?” I asked.

“No, not piss-off. But there’s plenty of comedy out there. This is my comedy for my target audience which I have found. There’s enough of them there.”

“Have you based your stage persona on someone else?” I asked.

“Who?”

“That’s why I asked,” I said.

“No,” said Luisa firmly. “I’ve based myself on me.”

“Who were your idols?”

“Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams, Steve Martin, Cher, Beyoncé.”

“Steve Martin’s different,” I suggested.

“Yeah, but in his films, he’s very physical and clowny.”

“You dance very well in the show,” I said.

“You’re joking,” laughed Luisa. “I can’t dance at all. I just dance with conviction. Improv is all about conviction. If you’re pretending to die, do it with conviction. If you’re dancing and you’re nervous about it, you dance harder and that’ll get you through.”

“I saw an interview with Fred Astaire,” I mused, “where he said Ginger Rogers actually couldn’t dance… but she could act dancing brilliantly.”

“Exactly,” said Luisa. “You do it with enough conviction and people will believe you. And dancing is a big thing with Beyoncé.”

“But what if people don’t know a lot about Beyoncé?” I asked. “That excludes them from the show?”

“No, because they just see someone dancing silly and enjoying it for dancing silly’s sake.”

“But why should I – if I’m a 26 year-old comedy-goer – go see a show about Beyoncé with Beyoncé in the title if I don’t know about or like Beyoncé?”

“Well, there’s plenty of other shows for you to go and see!” laughed Luisa. “I’m not the only choice, God bless you!”

“Maybe you are the only choice.”

“For my audience, yeah.”

“So you are playing the Comedy Cafe here every Tuesday for eight weeks,” I said, “and then…?”

“I want to tour with it next year. So it’s me building a following and attacking it from different angles, making a good comedy show free and making it accessible. When I got 5-star reviews in Edinburgh, the next day I got comedy-savvy-goers who would come and be boring and sit there and think Oh, this is very interesting blah-blah blah-blah blah. My audience was alright those days, just a bit dead.

“But when I had groups of girls – black, white, Asian – dressed up to the nines coming in for a night out, that’s when I’d have that big reaction you saw tonight where it would blow the roof off. They’re the people that I’m trying to get. The people who don’t normally go to comedy and especially wouldn’t go to Jongleurs on a Friday or Saturday night. They’re the people I want to come to my comedy show and it’s a show that’s honest and truthful and relevant and it’s not pretentious, pretending to be something else or being clever with wordplay. If it’s not for you, by all means don’t come. But, if you want a bit of a party with jokes in, you’ll love it.”

“You don’t need a PR,” I told Luisa, “You are your PR. Have you seen Beyoncé perform live?”

“Yeah,” said Luisa. “She’s amazing. I nearly died. The way she performs – I thought I wanna perform like that… but with stand-up.”

Weird stuff involving a rat, Mr Methane, Iggy Pop and Charlie Chuck

So what is going on at St Pancras station in London?

In my blog yesterday I mentioned weird stuff happening at St Pancras – including a woman talking to a stuffed meerkat.

Today I was at St Pancras again and, blow me down, when I arrived and got off the train there was a group of five men dressed like OTT Chicago gangsters out of Guys and Dolls with striped suits, black shirts, white ties and wide-brimmed hats and one of ‘em had a stuffed rat sitting on his hat. At least I think it was stuffed. Again, no-one but me was giving them a second glance.

Then Mr Methane, the world’s only professional performing farter, phoned me from his theatre dressing room in Crawley. He said he was sitting at a traditional theatrical make-up mirror with light bulbs all round the edges. Very glitzy; very showbiz, you might think. But they were energy-saving bulbs. He said it looked a bit odd. Not really traditional showbiz at all.

I suppose this will spread because of the recession and European legislation.

Then I got a phone call from comedian Charlie Chuck and, almost as a throwaway, he mentioned something so odd I had to ask him to repeat it.

As the late Malcolm Hardee used to say, there is a thin dividing line between genius and madness and like most people I think the long-running SwiftCover car insurance TV ads may have crossed that border in the wrong direction because they are fronted by ‘wild man of rock’ Iggy Pop. It’s a bit like seeing Keith Richards fronting an ad for Tesco.

Even more odd is that, apparently, Charlie Chuck was also in the running to front the SwiftCover ads before Iggy Pop got the gig. I am still trying to get my head round what the already distinctly odd ads might have looked like with Mr Chuck.