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Willamette Week: Alive...Undead!By Max T. Malt Halloween, naturally, is my favorite holiday. There is something undeniably special to my shadow-dwelling heart about the Feast of Souls, the Day the Departed Walk Among Us. Clearly, I'm not alone, since the annual revenance of Halloween summons a darkling creativity among my fellow Children of the Portland Night. Just the other day, for example, I received a mysterious brown box adorned with various Representations of Death. Inside the box lay a matchbook (what deviltry do they suggest--what deviltry, indeed?) adorned with a cartoon demon, trident in hand. Inside, above the staggered rows of sulfur flame summoners, a website and secret password appeared. Accessing the Infamous Superhighway, I soon found directions to a most secret and luscious night of revelry scheduled very near to the drear day itself.... But I get ahead of myself. For there is no need to wait to begin the nighttime revels. Courtesy of ever-ambitious burlesque impresaria Kitty Diggins, of whom much has been written in this column and elsewhere, a most worthy tribute to the black-and-orange holiday unfolds this very weekend in the cozy environs of Berbati's Pan. The Mad Monster a GoGo weds several of Diggins' loves: burlesque theater, go-go dancing and the goof-gonzo horror shtick of the '50s and '60s. While many Halloween events these days either mirror the innumerable horrors of the real world a little too closely or take the holiday's pagan roots a little too earnestly, MMaGG holds no such illusions about its own weight. "This is going to be very silly and ridiculous," Diggins says confidently. She promises sketch-comedy sendups of the frequent live-TV mess-ups on the classic camp show Dark Shadows, Herschell Gordon Lewis' cheeseball gore flick Color Me Blood Red, The Twilight Zone and even an undead I Love Lucy. An on-stage haunted house, a contest to name the Scream Queen of this particular Season of Mists, spook burlesque, glow-in-the-dark witch doctor go-go dancers and Diggins' own dip into something bright and red will no doubt complete a marathon of over-the-top ghoulery. As a final coup de grâce, Diggins has wisely retained the services of the Natrons, a three-headed monster of graveyard blooze that somehow caught an echoing Delta death rattle in a Mason jar and has been amplifying and distorting it ever since. After their now-notorious NXNW showcase at Jimmy Mak's, where no plate of calamari was left unscorched, the trio is likely as hot to trot as could be. In fact, they probably feel it in their bones. The Mad Monster a GoGo KOMEDIC KAPERS AND KRAZINESS Don Barnhart and Danny Vilipando ComedySportz (originally published in the WIllamette Week, October 17, 2000) |
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