Monday, October 24, 2005

TOUR JOURNAL - Philadelphia

In Philly with Lisa "Suckdog" Crystal Carver and Dame Darcy and crew. On the ride here, we saw a sticker on the side of a light post that said, "Dog Waste Removal" and a phone number. Picking up a dog's business is apparently someone's business. They just come over and pick up your dog shit...off your...lawn...I guess. Or, wherever...

We arrived in Philly around 5 and went to Franklin Institute to see the Bodyworks exhibit. It was intense, grotesque, profound, stunning, bizarre, provocative, shameless, and other adjectives. This man took people who had donated their bodies to science, and used them to create this huge exhibit with rooms and rooms full of real live dead people posing in all these different poses, from playing basketball, to dancing, to a dead man riding a real dead horse. There were also all these real organs and slices of every body part you can imagine from brains to hearts to livers to fat people's legs, splayed out in cases so you could gawk at them in complete shock, horror and amazement. I've always been acutely aware of my own mortality and being in that exhibit made me even more aware of it. I was a bit overwhelmed with how many poses you can put dead people into. He also posed birds, and the aforementioned horse, and there was also a whole room with a pregnant woman with her stomach cut open to reveal her dead baby, fetuses at every stage of pregnancy, and a bunch of dead babies who'd died in the womb from various causes.

I left feeling a bit like a walking dead person.

The show was at Robin's Books at 7 PM, and it was a fun time. Dame Darcy played some songs on her autoharp, then I played some dirty folk rock songs. We then did a few sketches, which went over pretty crazily. If any of you have ever seen Lisa's stuff, you'll understand what this means.

We capped off the evening at Tattooed Mom's on South Street, making beaded necklaces and belts with the tons of buckets of beads they left out for drunk people to enjoy.

A good time was had by all.

DC tomorrow night, NYC on Tuesday.

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