Commencement

“Okay, got it.” I exhaled and started combing out my hair.

“Jane,” Sasha said from the doorway. “Let your creativity flow tonight. I know you’ve been working on new routines, new costumes and ideas. I want to see them all. This is the perfect audience for it. Just do whatever you like. Every fourth dance is yours, and in between your sets I expect you on the floor. Try to keep breaks to a minimum.”

“No problem.” I grinned at her. “I can really do whatever I want?”

“Yes, I’m counting on it.”



* * *



Kandy, Krystal and Kaia where three of Sasha’s best dancers and heroes in my mind for delaying their weekend plans to help out this evening at the club. They often danced together, parties and private gigs under the name The Special K’s. Tonight they showed up with a trunk full of costumes and a bottle of Schnapps. I brought my unpacked suitcase in from my car and we dumped the contents of both cases onto the floor of the dressing room. We had about twenty minutes to plan a long night of impromptu routines.

“You’ve got a turkey costume?” I asked, staring bemused at the large fabric poultry corpse that lay at my feet.

“We had a gig at a club in Boston last night,” Kandy answered. “One of those ‘dinner and a show’ things, so we did a Burlesque Turkey dinner.”

“You guys are geniuses,” I said, picking up the turkey costume and marveling at the expert placement of Velcro that resulted in a costume that could be removed a piece at a time, and put back together again later. “Oh my God, let’s use these tonight! It’s perfect for Sasha’s Tasting Party theme.”

“Yeah, I’m game,” said Krystal. “But we’ve just got the three pieces. Turkey, an ear of corn and an apple pie.”

“What, no pumpkin?” I laughed.

“We were gonna get pumpkin,” said Kaia seriously. “But Kandy said they’re too seasonal.”

“Apple pie is more versatile,” Kandy explained. “We can use it on July fourth, too.”

“Hey,” I said, “let’s one of us be a chef, you know, chase the others around the stage and pretend to carve off bits of the costume as part of the routine.”

“Oh, like that scene from The Little Mermaid,” said Kaia, “when the chef chases that little fish around!”

“Yeah, sure.” I laughed. “Malcolm’s got a chef hat in the kitchen that’s just sitting on a shelf.” I walked to the dressing rooms row of costume racks and rifled through it. “Add that to a nurse’s uniform, topped with an apron,” I said, holding up my finds as I gathered them, “looks enough like a chef to me.”

“And we’ve got this prop Kandy used for her Halloween routine,” said Krystal, lifting a large plastic butcher knife out of the costume trunk.

“Awesome, ladies.” I smiled at them. “Okay, here’s what we are going to do…”



* * *



A house full of rowdy customers, a mix of the visiting Canadian businessmen and a dozen or so locals, drank and ate and hooted and cheered as the Special K’s and I danced our routines for the night. At midnight, we performed our feature presentation, prancing onstage to Diana Krall’s sexy cover of “Frim-Fram Sauce”. As the chef, I chased my culinary conquests down the stage and into the audience, whacking off bits of their costumes playfully whenever I caught up with them.

I captured Kaia by the drumstick across a customer’s lap, and revealed a healthy chunk of her backside to his entire table.

“Mmmm, so tender,” I quipped as I smacked her on the ass.

Krystal, our sassy ear of corn, was shucked to her pasties when I cornered her by the bar.

“Tasty niblets!”

Kandy received a raucous chorus of approval when I sliced off her costume and mimed taking a big bite of her pie.

“So juicy!”

Once defrocked, I gathered up my delicious morsels, and dragged them back to the stage, where a pile of their discarded costumes lay like a heap of garbage ready for the kitchen disposal. There they turned the tables on me, wrestling the knife from my grasp and chasing me back into the audience as DJ Mandy switched from “Frim-Fram Sauce” to the Benny Hill theme song. I flailed and squealed as I ran, darting around customers and leaping over laps, shedding bits of my own costume as I went, like a naughty culinary-themed keystone cop routine.

As I wove through another set of tables, I saw a foot dodge out, and too late to redirect my course, I tripped, falling over into the lap of the offender, a large bald man with a deep red nose and breath that reeked of whiskey.

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