I’m annoyed by burlesque. I’m annoyed by the shellacked, rubberized, pink, squishy, edge-of-raunch, hand-over-mouth-like-Bettie-Davis burlesque. My sister used to say it’s just “stripping for fat girls.” And that’s pretty much what it is! If you’re too chubby to be objectified by men in the more-nekkid way, you might as well strap on some vintage underwear and embrace the good old-fashioned way, when women with bigger butts and wider hips were the norm.
Nothing against fat girls or sexy vintage underwear. That’s cool. I personally have a gigantic 60’s ass. And even in the 60’s they would have thought it was a big ass, probably. They would have said “She’s a lobster…all the meat’s in the tail! Hot-cha cha cha chaaaaa!”
I do have a problem with burlesque girls looking at chicks who dance at the Admiral Club or Diamond City and go “Ewww what a whore.” It’s all the same thing. Maybe you’re covered up about 27% more than she is at the end of the night, and you and your burlesque troupe friends have to split the door price instead of getting your own tips, but come on. It’s all just dancing around in panties, isn’t it? And for some reason, the girls who do burlesque just always happen to get on my very last goddamn nerve. It’s an annoyance that’s separate from my hatred of burlesque, they’re a dipshit first, an old-timey stripper second. I just can’t say I’m surprised when some bitch that has annoyed me to no end for all the time I’ve known her tosses out there “Oh, here’s a flier for my burlesque troupe, we’re doing a show this Friday night.” You don’t say.
Halloween is the day when girls wear skanked-out lycra straps over their nipples and call it a costume. Burlesque is the nonstop Halloween for the jiggly-fleshed girl, because “It’s not skanky because it’s art, okay?”
I think it’s really exciting and interesting. It seems (with) this revival, women are embracing this style and want to have fun with it and they want to embrace their inner bombshell and get really..you know have fun with dressing up and feeling their own ..like..confidence and sexual power. They are seeing a different version of sexy other than a blonde bikini babe, tan, and natural running down a beach in slow motion. You know, this is a different kind of sexy and I think there is a lot of women who can relate to this style. . .”–Dita Von Teese, aka Heather Renee Sweet, to Katie Couric, who you know does not give a shit.
ick.
Oh, tell it to the fucking Pussycat Dolls.
Anyway. I had this boss once when I worked in retail who was a tooootal cocksucker. No, really, she sucked a lot of cock. And it was weird that she did that because she also hung out around groups of boys and did the whole “Hey, hey dudes: I’m a lesbian. What do you think of that? Does that turn you on, that I’m a lesbian? Because I’m SUCH a lesbian. WINK WINK!” Meanwhile, her girlfriend, a Filipino art student who was like 6 years younger, stayed at home all day babysitting her son for her. I always felt sorry for that girl, but not too sorry, because hey, you chose to do that to yourself. I had a friend who called my fake lesbian boss the Faux Lesbeaux, which, over time, translated itself into the name everyone used for her eventually: the Flezboss.
This woman was stupid. I’d wager she still is.
The Puma store where I worked had a back alley, where The Homeless liked to congregate at night. This alley had a dumpster that was strategically placed to hide the back door from street view. There, in the shadow of the dumpster, The Homeless would unleash their bowels. It just so happened to be right in front of our back door. So, the Flezboss created a Support Ticket! to have someone come clean the alley. On it, she wrote, in her cutesy “Aren’t I just a little airhead? Hee hee hee!” way, “Back door has fisis behind it.” Fisis. Because in her mind, it’s cute when you spell things majorly wrong. She then took that piece of paper around to everyone and said “Look! Look how silly and stupid I am!!! Is this how you spell feces? Hey, does anyone know how to spell feces? Teehee!”
She pretty much hated women, but her lezzy cover-up served to dispel that rumor, because “I love women! They’re totally hot and they turn me on and I go down on them. Does that, uhhh…do anything for you??” She constantly made bitchy comments under her breath about women customers or coworkers. If a male visitor, customer, or coworker talked to anyone but her, she squeezed herself into the conversation, flipping her hair and batting her eyelashes and mentioning her sexual orientation as casually as possible. Her only attempts to socialize or connect with her female coworkers was to feign idiocy over her menstrual cycle every month. She’d announce that she had to go to the bathroom because of “Girl issues!” She’d ask us for tampons, all the while shoving the tampons she’d bought that morning deeper into her purse so we wouldn’t see them. It was so we could bond, you know? Like women bond over their periods in shitty movies and brainless burps of television.
She tried her damnedest to get myself and like four other women fired for arbitrary shit like “Your tone this morning was negative” or “I could tell from your facial expression while you were reading the week’s numbers that you were being negative.” One day I came in, she brought me into the office, sat me down, and handed me a piece of paper to sign. The piece of paper said that she had been the only witness to me saying something derogatory, to myself, in another room, about a manager. And that since she witnessed this (through a wall), I was on my Final Warning. I think, on that day, I just kind of wept at the futility of it all, how fucking stupid it was that fake lesbians with fat asses had the power to yank my crappy ass retail job out from under me. She was just an asshole. Why in God’s name would you fire ANYONE from a shitty job in a basement of a Puma store? Isn’t there something else you could be doing? This comment she told HR she overheard never happened. I’d shout it from the rooftops right now if I’d said it. And I didn’t.
I’m pretty sure she just didn’t like that I was smart, and I could see through her bullshit. People haaaate to be around someone like that, someone who knows when you’re being a stupid asshole on purpose. That’s probably why she had another piece of paper sent down from Retail HR On High to tell my favorite manager and friend that she was “being too clique-y” with the staff. This was like a day and a half after she tried to win cool points with the staff by going around with her bad-assery badge on her sleeve, saying that just the night before she and another member of the staff had driven around in her car with open PBR tall boys.
Here’s some old blog posts about her, which I wrote under my own name and threw out there on the interwebs for all to see, too young and stupid to realize that she’d find them and my work life would be even more hellish than I ever thought possible:
So when the Flezboss stopped me, at 5:01, from clocking out and running directly into traffic so that she could lean into my face and stage-whisper “DO YOU HAVE A TAMPON?!?” like it was the first time she’d ever asked me that question, it was actually very hard not to just lean into her face and scream my fucking head off.
I wish I had exploding tampons with nails wrapped around them. I’d give her one of those. Because she asks me every fucking month–and I think I’ve blogged this before–if she can have one of my tampons. Like she’s completely taken by surprise by the fact that she needs them at the same predictable time every fucking month, the fat fool. I guess they do use double the amount over at the Lezzie Borden she calls an apartment, and maybe it’s harder to stay stocked up, but Jeeeezus Christ on a cracker. Buy the big box, you fucking asshole. You and that oily little catfish you call a girlfriend couldn’t use that many in a month.
Anyway, I’m going to start drawing up plans for exploding tampons. Then I’ll give one to her and if she’s smart she won’t ask for one again.
And of course I have a giant box of them in my locker, but I always give her the same doofy look she’s giving me, shrug, and say, “Nope!”
Then one day she got a new job:
You know what also lifts a girl’s spirits?
When the fucking white-trash skank whore thorn in her side gets loosed and falls out. That’s right: the Flezzboss, the famous, hated, shitty excuse for a leader is being banished to an outlet in Florida, where she will rot for all eternity beneath piles of rejected Made in Vietnam shoes. By August 1st, she’ll be gone, jettisoned from Chicago just as fast as the plane’s fuel can carry her fat ass.
I keep having to take a moment for a deep breath and a wave of calm realization that the bitch is almost wiped out of my life for good. Ugh.
Now I can buy cute scarves and jeans and not have to worry about someone going out and buying the same one, then wearing it the next day, and then pointing out that she bought the same scarf or pair of jeans as me.
Of course, she just went out and got her hair cut like mine, after telling me she was going to. But she can have whatever haircut she fucking wants, as long as she stays in fucking Florida and gets eaten by the monster we call A High Volume Outlet.
And I won’t have to worry about getting written up every time I breathe wrong, and I won’t have to worry about whether or not my fatty boss is comfortable with my facial expression during the morning meeting, and I won’t have to listen to her screeky voice ever again while she talks shit about everyone on the phone. It’s like I had a giant tumor of fakeness in my life, and it’s being removed.
And here’s a little clip of her being a total suicide pig:
I totally agree that I'm a good person. I just wanted to talk real quick about how amazing I am now that someone is dead.
Sometimes when I think about her, I get really angry. I get mad that I was under the direction of a person like that, who basically had carte blanche to do whatever the hell she wanted to me. When people like that are in power, even if it’s just a management job in a shoe store, you basically have to sit there and smile stupidly and stay out of their way and never EVER let them think for a second you might be the slightest bit offended by their racist/sexist jokes, which they tell with their eyes blinking stupidly, pretending not to know that what they just said is totally inappropriate. You’re supposed to laugh along and be just as much of an asshole as they are because people like that are fucking bullies, and if you stand up to a bully who manages a shoe store, get ready to be fired from A FUCKING SHOE STORE.
I swear there’s a point to all of this.
The point is this: recently my anger and annoyance, deeply rooted in the past and lying sideways somewhere under my liver like a little rock, flared up a little bit. See, I go all over the interwebs looking for pictures of cupcakes and cupcake recipes and fun stuff that makes me feel good, which usually means that I do lots of Google searches for things including the word “cupcake.” It’s unfortunate that Safe Search would never have protected me from what I found not too long ago. It appears that, aside from getting arrested, my former boss has been spending her time having her photo taken in such a way that darkens the word “cupcake” and all its positive connotations forever:
No...please stop...
Ohmygod.
These images come to us courtesy of “Cupcake Pinups,” a photography studio that is so serious about its love of sugar, rockabilly, tattoos, and strappy underwear, that it’s actually invested in a real Facebook page to promote its business.
Upon seeing these, I wanted to douse my brain in lighter fluid and set it on fire. And don’t even think I take any satisfaction in the death imagery above: I don’t wish this woman dead and that wouldn’t make me happy. What would make me happy is if everyone quit talking to her, forever and ever. All I see here is a tubby bitch lolling around in a fake cemetery with her mouth open like she’s saying “HEYYYYYY How do you spell feces?!?! HAHAHA LOL!”
And why…whyyyy did they have to use a cupcake for this asscrappery? That’s what made it possible for this cunt from the fake graveyard of Hell to haunt me, years later and now that I no doubt make a better salary than she ever did in the shoe store management circuit. She has reached across time and the deep web to torment me with this horrifying example of Rockabilly-burlesque fusion with a cherry on top.
And yes, that is a fake cupcake tattoo splotched on her arm. For the sake of the art, you know.
Happy Fucking Halloween, indeed.
Cupcake Heartbreak 