San Francisco Sentinel
May 17, 1990
Street Talk
Sin City
By Doris Fish
How could I sink so low as to lip-synch to ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” and yet still have it be one of the high spots at that low dive, DNA?
When housework seems suddenly attractive and the flared old sequined slacksuit appears as a thing of horror, filling you with dread and foreboding, then you know you’re in for a bumpy night. “Sin City”, a night of sexy, salacious cabaret with an offensive poster and a list of talented types up to your asshole.
And some of the talent was pretty okayish. Gwenfish, (no relation) and Bucket were at least wildly enthusiastic, giving a young raw performance, probably because they were young and raw. Connie Champagne looked too young to even be there but with the ever-keen Gere Finelli on keyboard, her voice once again hit the sky with the theme from “Valley of the Dolls”.
I liked the girl eating the cherries on the big bed and the strippers caused a few tongues to hang out, but the evening felt old and tired. Or was it just me? After 3 or 4 “Smut Fests” and a “Sluts” night, “Sin City” as a concept needs a little polishing and rubbing up to cure its limpness.
Phil Ford and I dragged out one of our old duets, “This Could Be the Start of Something Big”, which it wasn’t. But we did manage to look okay. I squeezed into the old gold slacksuit and pinched my feet with my tiny gold platform shoes while Phil looked dapper in his gold jacket and chains. We laughed and smiled and acted like we weren’t really embarrassed, and kind people said we were “stunning”.
One young person even told me she “enjoyed” my visual interpretation of “Dancing Queen”. I was so shocked by her seeming sincerity that I failed to notice if she was wearing a hospital gown. Another person made a point of telling me that Abba was one of his favorite groups. These two remarks just made me feel alienated, and I hid backstage for a few hours trying to pass out on the lumpy sofa —was it the sofa or lumpy old moi?
With Tippi and Miss X lounging in a swimming pool in Florida, I thought “Sin City” would be a good opportunity for me to glow, solo in the spotlight. I was glowing all right, like an old burning mattress on the sidewalk.
Happily, the backstage crowd was growing rosier by the minute and beautiful girls were comparing their “magnificent pearlescent orbs,” as Robert Mitchum once called breasts. Any talk of body parts, and especially “show and tell” of cosmetically enhanced mammaries really excites me, scientifically of course. It wasn’t long before a small bevy of us girls were checking each other for softness and size, with lots of girlish laughter and little hugs, innocent sisterly little hugs. I’ve hugged and kissed a number of lovely women, but I have no lesbian tendencies, though I don’t disapprove of that sort of thing. I say this plainly in the hope of avoiding an “outing” next week. I would hate shoppers across America to see lovely me plastered across the cover of the Enquirer, with poor Chastity Bono cut out and stuck on top of me saying, “I Was Doris Fish’s Lesbian Lover” or worse, “Would-Be Has-Been Doris Fish Caught in Lesbian Orgy”.
But I digress; all this lovely hugging really perked me up and I no longer felt old and lumpy (and talentless) and cheerfully changed into my next young person’s outfit, a stretch satin —oops! I mean spandex-fluouro-pink micro mini, a big-collar neon orange skintight blouse which I teamed with day-glo lime fishnets and matching belt and earrings! To top it off, I wore a pair of hot red platform “pimp” boots. Now I was ready for my last duet with Phil.
“The Last Duet” was a wise choice. Barry Manilow and Lily Tomlinson did the original parody recording, which we decided to interpret visually, saving our own voices for posterity. Obscure and yet familiar, the music lulled the quickly diminishing crowd into an early-eighties stupor which accounted for the almost-no applause as we ran off, thrilled that our “Hustle” moves had been sort-of together, kind of.
It was suddenly very late, so I wished Bambi “Good Luck” and got one last hug from her voluptuous go-go girl, Stephanie, then a “Toodle-oo” to big-voiced Prince Valium and off we went in our nice warm taxi. Most of my embarrassment had evaporated, and I was feeling pretty good. After all I still looked sort of okay for “a forty-five-year-old welfare mother with four little ones”, even though I’m really thirty-something and “the little ones” are just cats. An interesting evening, but I don’t think I’ll do it again.
