12-006
There is no such thing
as true compromise
Playboy
Playmate Holly Madison is the star of “Peepshow,” the long-running burlesque
show at Planet Hollywood Las Vegas. Madison plays Bo Peep, a rich, gorgeous,
buxom blonde who like all rich, gorgeous, buxom blondes just can’t seem to find
a man.
I journeyed
into “Peepshow’s” storybook dreamland with my fiancée. “It has dancing and
singing and it’s amazing,” she said, trying to convince me to go. “There are
also a lot of breasts.” This sounded like my kind of compromise, so I agreed to
go.
We sat in
row Z, the last row. From our vantage point the actresses’ breasts were
visible, but just barely. Unfortunately for me, the director made the
ill-conceived decision to cast only women with anatomically-believable chests.
For the
first time in my life I needed those theater binoculars that old men who wear
monocles and fancy ladies who say “Oh, dear!” have. When I squinted, I could
make out breast-like shapes. It was not unlike watching scrambled cable
channels as a teenager, except as a teenager I never paid $84 to sort-of see
some hooters from 200 feet away.
In the
story Peep falls asleep while reading a fairytale. The stage show is her dream
and in it she encounters a series of sexualized characters from the book. In one
very believable and necessary scene Peep is seduced by lesbian spiders.
In the
middle of the show, the Peep Diva—whose role as MC is to keep the plot from
veering into coherency—sends her sub-divas into the audience to find a man for
Peep. The man they find at our show, whose name is Timber, is clearly a plant.
Peep flirts
with Timber by dumping a bucket of neon pink paint on his head and clothes.
It’s when Timber does not respond with loud obscenities that you know he’s a
plant.
Timber
disappears for a few scenes and reemerges dripping wet from a random bathtub.
He performs a series of rope stunts while suspended above the tub; the
impressive aerial feats win Peep’s heart. All Peep needed this whole time, it
turns out, was a possibly hypothermic gymnast to emerge from a common bathroom
fixture.
Peep and
Timber consummate their love with a dramatic pose.
The show
culminates with a song-and-dance number in which Madison, who has never shown
her breasts before in public, except in the world’s most popular men’s magazine
and onstage nightly in Las Vegas, gives her precious gift to the audience. It
is quite a finale, a wonderful chance to see something I have seen before, only
from much farther away and at great expense.