The Burlesque Dancer Has Landed

The phone-that-is-a-fax-machine rings. I answer. A small-sounding, tentative female voice says, "Um, hi? Is Dana there?"

I say no, Dana's out of town, can I take a message. She says, "Oh! No. Um. Is this? The girl? From Canada?" I say yes.

"Oh, hi. It's Dana's friend, Louise."

"Lessa?" I ask after a moment. She says yes and tells me she has hot food waiting for her and she'll call me back.

I hang up the phone and remember the first time I met Louise/Lessa in a lounge in Le Marais. I accidentally head-butted her in a Parisian kiss-kiss gone wrong and she yelled at me really, really loudly. And then she proceeded to napalm, carpet-bomb, atomic-hydrogen-Nagasaki ANNIHILATE my lil'-Canadian-girl-from-the-suburbs comfort zone into a pile of steaming rubble.

This is the woman who only dates non-biological men. The woman who teaches bondage workshops. The woman who, when she's not doing strange things with vacuum cleaners onstage, is a part-time dominatrix.

Only during that phone call, she sounded more like Minnie Mouse on downers. Weird.

I putter around the flat, making dinner and learning the hard way what Cru Bourgeois means. (Bad wine.) She calls again. I ask if she's performing anywhere while I'm here.

"Well, I'm in Dublin until Monday," she says. "Then on the 26th, I'm running a workshop on anal lovin' and...oh! On March 8th I have a performance."

Anal. Lovin'.

Now, THIS is the girl I came to see.

I tell her I hear she's doing a one-woman show. "Yeah, I'm working on the text now. It's a real departure for me...because I've been working in more visual mediums." Like porn shows in Berlin, says my Inside Voice.

I offer to help her with her show, which she accepts excitedly. We make plans to meet up next week when she returns from Dublin.

"One question," I ask her. "What should I call you?"

"When there's false eyelashes involved, call me Louise."