Hello Everybodies:
As many of you may have heard, my dear friend Lisa has taken over the old Eli's Mile High Club in Oakland and has reinvented it as the new Mile High Club. Oakland will never be the same. Please join us on Tuesday, June 29th for the grand opening AND the launch of
SpeakEasily, my jazz age vaudevillian kultur-fest, which will be happening every Tuesday night until the wheels fall off.

Enjoy Weimar Perversions at Rock-Bottom Oakland Prices

SpeakEasily ~ Opening Gala
June 29, 2004
The Mile High Club
3629 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Oakland CA
Doors and Meter Dancing at 8, Show starts at 9
$7

HEAR: The sizzling sounds of Hot and Bothered
The swingslam stylings of Comfy Chair
The salty songs of Jack Salteen
SEE: Burlesque bombshell Indra
Mischievous minx Rose Pistola
The ethereal Kellita of Hot Pink Feathers
The mystifying Mr. Mystic
DANCE WITH: The Mile High Meter Dancers
With Mistress of Ceremonies Odessa Lil

for additional info, contact speakeasily@gmail.com
www.elisblues.com

SpeakEasily is every Tuesday and we're always looking for terrifically
decadent acts.

~Additionally, you can join our announcements list by becoming SpeakEasily's Friendster on Friendster (keeping fingers crossed on that technology...). This is also a good way to get to meet The Mile High Meter Dancers and SpeakEasily personalities. Odessa Lil is really forging ahead with the Friendster campaign and is currently trying to recollect the finer moments she's spent with the SpeakEasily crowd, submitting them as testimonial. Most of these accounts will probably be rejected, so why not post them here?! (Dodges hate mail...)

Shanghai Sue and I once went halfsies on a shipment of laudanum the Count brought back from outer Galicia. The plan was to sell it at a 150% mark-up and start that all-girl klezmer band that we had always wanted with the profits. When I awoke the next morning, Shanghai was gone, the Count was gone, Cha-Cha the helper monkey was gone, three gallons of laudanum were gone, and so was my hair. G-d, I respect that broad.

Rose came to me once and tried to sell me three magic beans. "Stop right there!" I said. "You think I was born yesterday? Magic Beans?" Rose scooped them up and threw one into the Black Sea, turning it into a massive bowl of champagne. She fed the second to Cha-Cha my helper monkey and turned him into Rudolph Valentino. The third bean she aimed like a gun until it became a silver pistol with mother of pearl inlay. She shot ol' Rudolph, we took his wallet, and then we went swimming in the champagne. I said to Rose, "You truly have magical powers!" to which Rose said, "Yeah, I'm like the Jesus that didn't get nailed."

Once Lisa and I were walking the grounds of her summer villa in lower Moldova, talking of metaphysics, the weight of the human soul, whether or not the afterlife had cable, when suddenly we came upon huge and flaming crevasse. She offered to cover it with her velveteen riding coat so that I may pass. "No! No! It's a new coat!" I said, and then I offered to cover it with my then husband, Sir Wilberforce Kulinger. "No! Why he's fairly new as well," she protested. She then offered to cover it with the sandwiches that we had brought for lunch. But I intervened. "What if we become hungry?!" So in the end, we dove in and live there, happily ever after, to this day.

Adam was at one point employed as my personal horse. We would roam the Carpathians, just he and I and Cha-Cha my helper monkey, looking under rocks and shrubs for tube amps. When he would find a particularly tasty piece of merch, he would rear up, nearly tossing Cha-Cha and me from the saddle. Those were idyllic times. Before the great tube gear pogroms. Since then, he won't even look Cha-Cha in the eye.

Count F___ collects trouble like some men collect stamps. He showed me his collection once while we were summering in the south of Lublin. Unfortunately, later that day, Cha-Cha, my helper monkey, ate it. Count! Will you ever forgive Cha-Cha?! He knows not what he does!

Today I saw Our Dancing Daughters (1928), a silent staring Joan Crawford, which was part of the Roxie Theater's Deco Festival. There were about four of us in the theater...me and three old men, who were also alone. There was this great moment in the film when Crawford toasts over a glass of champagne (in the intertitle), "To myself! I have to live with myself until I die - so may I always like - myself!"



Question: Someone of the MAC-using sort said my blog looks all vermisht, with text scrunched over to the right side...is anyone else having this problem too?

They love ČEDNE DVADESETE in Croatia!

On this day, in 1924, Kafka died of tuberculosis after a lifetime of hypochondria.

“Our world is merely a practical joke of God.”

Many of you are aware of the fact that I live in a car hole (garage, for you fancy French speaking types), and up until recently it's been nothing but a walk in the park...an expensive, illegal, un-zoned park, but you know...it's my place and I don't have to share it with anyone except Maggie Katzenberg, my cat. Unfortunately, the car hole turned on me yesterday.

I was on my way out the garage door to a Memorial Day picnic without a care in the world (except for the constant, nagging existential worries, of course, and the usual crippling feelings of simultaneous loneliness and self-imposed exile), when, after many tries of pulling on the door with all of my feeble might, I realized that the garage door wasn't in operating condition. As it’s the only way out of my house, I immediately started panicking, pacing, leaving message after message on my landlord’s machine, taking stock of the food situation (licorice, cat food, soy milk…uh oh). The next 45 minutes were spent shaking the door, throwing myself at the door, and pacing in front of the door. I felt utterly alone. I couldn’t imagine calling any of my friends to ask for help. I don’t like to ask for favors. It’s so undignified…unlike throwing myself at a garage door for 45 minutes.

I finally got up the courage to wake up Ali and Bethanne, who said, “I’ll be there in an hour.” Once I’d broken the ice of asking for favors, I called up Ukiah (who’s in Ukiah) for some garage door tech support. After trying several things at his suggestion and getting nowhere, he told me the following parable:

“There was a lady without arms and legs, but she made it to the beach and was basking in the sun and the sand. An attractive young man walked by and she thought how much better the day would be if he made love to her, so she asked the man to fuck her. The man picked her up and threw her into the ocean. There, he said, now you’re fucked. That lady is you.”

Ali, Bethanne, and I were able to lift the door together and I escaped to freedom and picnic. Luckily, the door was still propped open when I got home so I was able to gain reentry to my house. And like so many things, it magically fixed itself in the 9 hours I was at work today. There is a landlord in heaven after all.