None of us had expected too much of Kitty, but she proved to have a good head for business and, better still, a good sense of showmanship. Dave operated the club on a sort of “If we put hot naked girls on stage, they will come” theory. Kitty looked at that and said, “Well, yes, but how are we going to get them to come back?” Dave’s Fish and Strips closed its doors for good a week after Kitty took it over. Two months after that, the Freakshow was born.
Have a prehensile tail? Wear a miniskirt and use it to carry an extra tray when you’re serving drinks. Got wings? How do you feel about swinging on a perch suspended from the ceiling? Cryptids of every race and creed were invited to come and show off the things that divided them from the human race—and every one of them who did just helped to raise the Freakshow’s cred a little higher. There was even a review in the New Yorker, calling it a “cunning use of smoke and mirrors,” and “a fantastic example of the misuses one can manage with a degree in theatrical makeup and costuming.” In short, it was so in-your-face that everyone assumed it had to be fake, and the human populace of the city was all but busting down the doors for the chance to dance with the monsters they still didn’t believe in.
Still, every gimmick has its shelf life, and Kitty knew that if she wanted to keep the Freakshow running, she would need to have more than just a few strange but pretty faces on staff. She’d need actual entertainment. Well, that, and some of the stiffest drinks in the city, courtesy of our bartenders, Ryan and Angel.
All of which goes to explain why I scrambled to the middle of the stage less than a minute before curtain, wearing a corset, a ruffled black-and-red cancan skirt, high heels, and enough glitter to start my own David Bowie tribute band. In the end, no matter how tight the timing, the show must always go on.
“Ladies and gentlemen, honored guests and less-than-honored neighbors, the Freakshow welcomes you to a night of thrills, chills, and sweet surprises that can be found nowhere else in this fairest of all fair cities.” Kitty always did her ringmaster act from the center of the stage, despite the fact that she’s a bogeyman, and should hence want to avoid the light whenever possible. I guess she never got to that page of the bogeyman edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves. She strutted back and forth between two precisely placed marks as she used her womanly wiles to get the attention of a rowdy crowd.
Her luck was usually good in that regard. Something about her wearing an outfit that looks like a classic ringmaster’s attire as reinterpreted by a designer who specializes in high-end fetish gear just managed to catch the eye. It didn’t hurt that she had the subtly inhuman proportions shared by all bogeymen, making her difficult to look away from.
I said Kitty changed the place after Dave left. I never said she made it classy.
“—and now, my beloved guests, if you would put your hands together for our sweet sugarplums, our cancan belles, our Freakshow dancers, the Scarionettes!” Kitty finished our introduction with a flourish, her heels hitting the floor with gunshot precision as she walked off the main stage half a step ahead of the opening curtain. Floodlights splashed down from the rafters, revealing eleven dancers in corsets and short ruffled skirts, all frozen in perfect clockwork doll poses as we waited for the music to begin.
The tapping of an unseen conductor’s baton echoed from the speakers, catching the attention of those patrons who had learned to ignore Kitty’s posturing in favor of sucking down cocktails while they waited for the floorshow to begin. Then Emilie Autumn’s “I Know Where You Sleep” blasted out, and we started to dance.
Kitty was being generous when she called the floorshow’s first number a “cancan.” I’ve danced the cancan, although never professionally, and while it does involve a lot of girls hiking their skirts to heaven, they’re usually doing it wearing outfits that look less like they came from the remainder bin at Hot Topic. Still, it was athletic, enthusiastic, and involved cute girls in high heels and corsets bouncing up and down for five minutes without stopping for air, which was more than sufficient for our clientele.
We whirled and spun around the stage, kicking, prancing, thrusting our chests out, and somehow managing to look like we were both classier and naughtier than your average stripper. A lot of the credit for that goes to my choreography, if I do say so myself. My specialty is Latin ballroom, which is all about pouring a whole lot of sexy into a very small amount of suggestive.
Off to one side of the stage, a chorus girl was deviating from the routine to snatch dollar bills from a leering man in a baseball jersey. Okay, so maybe the transition from stripper to dancer was still a work in process for some of my coworkers. I was happy to work with them as much as I had to, since failure might mean going back to cocktail waitressing. Any amount of coaching our slower learners was worth it if it meant I could avoid that particular fate. Even if I had to do my coaching in a corset.
The nicest thing about working in a bar with aspirations of growing up to be a burlesque joint: I might have to shake my tail feathers if I wanted to bring home a paycheck, but the rotation of the acts and the solo numbers in-between meant that I was only on stage once every ninety minutes during the busy periods.
I congratulated the rest of the chorus as they stampeded off the stage, narrowly avoiding the snake dancer who was shoving her way up the backstage steps with a large wicker basket in her arms. The basket hissed companionably as it passed me. I hissed back, trying to keep my tone respectful. It never pays to piss off a wadjet.
The main room was packed with bodies by the time I stripped off my chorus girl outfit—trading it for a much more demure lacy blouse-and-petticoat combination, and yes, moments like that are the only times when I miss the tacky little uniforms Dave used to make us wear—and pushed my way out of the dressing room into the crowd. A few men leered in my direction, but none of them made a move toward me. Proof that men of any sentient species can be taught.
Also proof that having a bad-ass tanuki bouncer who sometimes fills in behind the bar can work wonders for the female employees of a place like the Freakshow. I waded my way through bodies to the bar, where luck, timing, and the willingness to cut people off won me an open stool. The man I’d ducked under to get the seat glared at me. I flashed a bright smile and blew him a kiss, then turned my attention to the bartender currently mixing drinks for my side of the room.
“Ryan, I require something so horrifically alcoholic that it makes livers tremble with fear and run for their lives when its name is uttered,” I said solemnly.
Ryan raised an eyebrow. “Or I could get you a martini glass filled with club soda and garnished with something that makes it look like you’re actually drinking liquor for a change. That way when you left the bar, you might not fall off the nearest available rooftop.”
I grinned. “That sounds good. Let’s do that.”
“Why am I not surprised?” asked Ryan—but he was laughing as he said it, and he kept laughing as he moved to get me my drink. A woman bellied up to the bar next to me, giving his ass an appreciative look. Now, I’m happy to admit that Ryan has a fantastic rear end. He not only works out, he’s a therianthrope, a shapeshifter who gets his connection to the wild side through magic and genetics, not a curse-turned-infection. Plus, how many six-five half-Japanese hotties do you find on the street, even in Manhattan? Ryan was prime man-flesh on the hoof.