What’s happening in Vegas and New York came all the way to Salem in a trailer full of vaudeville performers.
The “Pretty Things Peepshow,” featuring vintage burlesque, stops by a few times a year with a brand new show, but with the usual bunch, including the show’s producer and designer, New-York based Go-Go Amy, Firefly, “The Midget of Mischief,” from Vegas, and their companions. In their sideshow they swallow swords, walk on glass and strip to rockabilly music all while maintaining a “cheesecake smile.”
Their performance took place at the end of Rust-o-Rama, a car show, at the Pavilion, where they teased classic car enthusiasts into coming to the after party … the show basically sold out.
The Peepshow’s Salem stop was part of a 65-city tour, though it may well be said they are permanently on tour.
“Five of us live in a van. I don’t have a life at all outside of this show,” said Go-Go Amy, who has not left the road for almost three years.
Go-Go Amy doesn’t mind: “Living uncomfortably would be having a job that I don’t really like and this is my dream job. I want to do this show until I die … which with this stress it may be soon,” she joked.
Go-Go Amy started doing theatre in high school. She majored in theatrical design and worked in nightclubs. She whipped all that together and created the Pretty Things Peepshow, picking her favorite people that she met along the way.
“I’m really proud of this show,” said Go-Go Amy, adding that she gets a lot of help from her mother, a kindergarten teacher in New York. “My mom is pretty rad,” she commented.
The connection between the sideshow and Salem started with Go-Go Amy’s pinup modeling and Cherry Red Boutique downtown, where she teaches the class “How to be a glamorous vintage pinup queen” when she’s in town.
“[Cherry Red] has done so much to make Salem cool. Every time I come there’s something new,” said Go-Go Amy.
Nina Nightshade, who owns the boutique with her husband, took her class and she was actually in the show (as a belly dancer). There were many other former students in the audience, all pinned up.
Go-Go Amy said after they learn, it becomes a daily thing for some, while others make a career out of it with pinup or burlesque modeling. Although the class costs $200 for one afternoon of hair, makeup and posing techniques, as well as a photo shoot, there was a turnout of about eighteen registrants, Go-Go Amy said.
She started offering the classes because, “After the show people come up and ask me, ‘How do you do it? How can I look like you?’ I was spending hours trying to teach people how to make a roller set,” she said. “I didn’t realize how getting a makeover on girls would change their self esteem and their personality … And they like the attention they get when they have really nice hair!”
The pinup class is only for women, although Go-Go Amy said she would accept those in drag. Men can also buy the DVD.
In order to teach the intricacies of glamor modeling to those who can’t afford the class or want to remember some of the details, the Pretty Things made an instructional video, which can be purchased from their website at prettythingsproductions.com and from amazon.com.
Instructions include glamorous hair-do’s and makeup and pinup modeling tips, in Amy’s words, “to release your inner ‘bombshell,’” a term that comes from the drawings of women in seductive poses who were actually painted on some World War Two bombers. However, the style of the Pretty Things is not exactly that which was found in the ’40s photographs and drawings of models from ‘girlie magazines’ that men used to pin to their walls. The modern retro style, or ‘neo-pinup’ subculture of those following this alternative lifestyle comes with tattoos, piercings and pink hair, yet conserving some of the fashion of the original Bettie Page.
