You can produce and promote a show
and you can book the best emcee and the finest performers in the land,
but if you don't have someone managing that stage, it will likely be a
mess. That's when you go see David Bishop.
Burlesque shows can be weird. You can easily have twenty or more performers at the big festival shows that are smart enough to hire David as their traffic cop, and that's a mix of big personalities and specialized props and costumes that may need a lot of help getting from one place to the next, to say nothing of cleaning up glitter dumps and any number of other foreign substances that can find their way to a burlesque stage (I just mean stuff like food and water and maybe some fake blood. Get your head out of the gutter, dear reader). It's a specialized job, to be sure, but David tackles it with ablomb, commanding a squad of stage kittens with military precision.
David more than manages the stage of most of his shows, he also frequently opens gigs with the infamous "Burlesque Blessing." I remember the first time I saw him, wondering who the hell this pope-looking guy was doing this blessing thing. Now that I've been blessed well into the double digits, I've come to embrace the theology David espouses ("Omnium, Pastieum, Tassleum...G-Stringum") with evangelical vigor. I think even agnostics or atheists can understand the power of ritual, and I'm happy that the Burlesque Blessing is our inclusive invocation at so many shows.
David has become one of my best friends in the burlesque community and I dearly appreciate when I can catch up with him for the five minutes he's not busy during the day helping to run tech and being certain everything will run smoothly. I've spoken with him A LOT, and I know his love of the art of burlesque and the many people he helps backstage to be profound and genuine.
I can also easily pick him him and carry him around, which is neither a positive or a negative, necessarily, but a fun fact to end on, nonetheless.
Burlesque shows can be weird. You can easily have twenty or more performers at the big festival shows that are smart enough to hire David as their traffic cop, and that's a mix of big personalities and specialized props and costumes that may need a lot of help getting from one place to the next, to say nothing of cleaning up glitter dumps and any number of other foreign substances that can find their way to a burlesque stage (I just mean stuff like food and water and maybe some fake blood. Get your head out of the gutter, dear reader). It's a specialized job, to be sure, but David tackles it with ablomb, commanding a squad of stage kittens with military precision.
David more than manages the stage of most of his shows, he also frequently opens gigs with the infamous "Burlesque Blessing." I remember the first time I saw him, wondering who the hell this pope-looking guy was doing this blessing thing. Now that I've been blessed well into the double digits, I've come to embrace the theology David espouses ("Omnium, Pastieum, Tassleum...G-Stringum") with evangelical vigor. I think even agnostics or atheists can understand the power of ritual, and I'm happy that the Burlesque Blessing is our inclusive invocation at so many shows.
David has become one of my best friends in the burlesque community and I dearly appreciate when I can catch up with him for the five minutes he's not busy during the day helping to run tech and being certain everything will run smoothly. I've spoken with him A LOT, and I know his love of the art of burlesque and the many people he helps backstage to be profound and genuine.
I can also easily pick him him and carry him around, which is neither a positive or a negative, necessarily, but a fun fact to end on, nonetheless.
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