Linus Gelber's photostream  

Last spring, Emily Zuzik and I spent a few easy hours walking through Brooklyn to shoot street portraits. It was a super session; she got the shots she wanted for her new CD and her web site and her upcoming gig promos, and there was plenty of material left over for future reference.

Emily has moved to L.A. in the time between, and is now pregnant and busy and happy out there. I've been reading her updates on Facebook, and it made me want to dig back into the archives and make up a new shot.

She's already using a variant of this one on her web site, but I like the hint of smile here, and the way she is slightly between expressions.

So, you know how sometimes it's been winter? And even if it's been a warm winter - a ridiculously warm, spring-like winter - it's still winter? And it's dark all the time? And even when it isn't actually dark, even when the sun is shining and it's warmer than it has any right to be, still, since it's winter, the colors of the world are brittle, pale, not full warm colors but always gray at the center? Or just under the surface, where you wish there was a pulse of growing beating nature in explosion, everything is still, and quiet, and the explosions you want to chase and thrill in the heart are silent, because it's winter, and this is the time for waiting, and wanting, and banking the fires? Because even if we don't need this part of our wiring just at the moment, the body knows that this is the time to just wait, and survive, and measure your resources, and save your food, and cherish your blessings, and it's cold and dark outside?

And you remember, a lifetime ago, when there were mermaids?

Gemma Stone plays the antic parts of Wakko and Brain in the Rhinestone Gorilla Burlesque's scripted musical Animaniacs send-up, the "Good Idea/Bad Idea" show. This means that she spends a lot of time with her tongue stuck out of one side of her mouth, and that when she isn't doing that, she is scheming to take over the world.

Late in the show, she delves deep into her Magic Bag - Wakko does have a Magic Bag, you can look it up - which is conveniently located between her legs. This overloads the simple expedient of a cartoon plot device with an amazing jolt of creepy sexual allusion, which is part of what the Rhinestone Gorillas are about, at heart: it's so completely wrong that it's kind of delightful.

From her Magic Bag, Gemma draws (among other things) a severed arm, complete with a white glove on the hand (which, in a perfect gratuitous stripper move, she gently removes, twirls, and tosses away), some sort of furry animal, a tie, a shoe (pink, high-heeled), and, pictured above, a plastic baseball bat. How does she do it? Surely the conveniently-placed curtain can't have anything to do with this magic moment.

The Animaniacs experts at the Rhinestone Gorilla Burlesque company tell me that there's always a mime in the Animaniacs shows, and that the mime generally does a brief bit and then comes to grievous harm.

In the company's spoofy Good Idea/Bad Idea revue last month, Sweet Samantha Jane, as the mime, prepares for a first date, which involves some preparatory intimate pruning. The date goes well, but alas, there is an anvil in her future.

In this graceful dance number, Medianoche wields this flapper's shawl like a matador handles a cape: directing and misdirecting the gaze, concealing and revealing by turns.

She's currently Wasabassco Burlesque's Performer of the Month, which puts her into their web spotlight for the current set of weeks. Here at the Bell House, she's in the spotlight for a whole different set of reasons.