For sale: costume for a winged fantasy creature. It’s part of the ongoing closet-purge. But I’m not selling this on eBay because of the size of the wings. Shipping it would be an impossible hassle. Whoever buys the outfit will have to pick it up in person.

Let me tell you the story of this outfit. It was made for me by local fashion designer Orion to wear in a fashion show a couple of years ago. I’ve been in a number of fashions shows, but this one was the most challenging, because of the locations. It was on the steps of the Seattle Art Museum downtown. If you have ever seen the stairs there, they are quite pretty – very broad and marble and curving. But they are not regular standard-sized steps. The breadth of them means you have to step down and then take, like, a little half step, and then step down again. They’re a little bothersome to use even in the best of circumstances.

The night of the show, the hair and makeup people teased my hair so far out that I looked like Medusa, and put a ton of glittery make-up on me. That was fine, but then Orion put a string of beaded fringe across my eyes. “An alien veil,” he called it. He also had all us models carrying, in one extended hand, a large glass globe filled with glittery beads. So, there I was, wearing sky-high platform heels, carrying a goldfish bowl in one hand, with these beads hanging down over my eyes. When it was our turn to walk, I looked down those long, broad, slippery marble steps lined with people and thought, “I can hardly see with these damn beads across my face. I am going to fall right on my butt in front of everyone and shatter glass everywhere.”

And then we started walking. Don’t look down at your feet, Matisse. Chin up, extend both arms out from your sides, balance the bowl, don’t bump into the other models, and look as cool and calm as an alien reptile would be. Don’t look at the crowd or the camera flashes will dazzle you.

Somehow I made it to the bottom of the steps without looking down, and without falling down. Everyone clapped for us. I heard Miss K, who was also a model, mutter, “Thank you God we don’t have to walk back up those damn things.” Miss K also told me later that a male friend of hers ran up to her after the show and said, “Please please, tell me the winged girl is single!” So as you see, it’s an attention-getting outfit.

I am sure some official photos exist somewhere, but I only found one in my archives, and it’s not the best photo of me I’ve ever seen. But you can get a sense of the outfit.

I’ve worn it about twice since then, because as you can see, it’s not something you throw on as a whim. I almost kept it just out of sentimental value. But it seems like a shame to just let it sit in a box, when it would make a great costume for someone. I’d actually be happier to pass it on to someone who would be thrilled with it, and have fun wearing it and being admired in it.

The basic outfit is a boned and lined bustier/corset-type-top and tight pants, with matching gauntlets. You could wear that without the rest of the costume and it’s a sexy outfit. But there are also the wings and an alligator-type tail, which make it an amazing and utterly unique costume.

The wings have adjustable elastic cords that you slide your arms into. The tail attaches to the back of the corset with hidden hooks. The gauntlets are of the same fabric as the pants, and they come down over the back of your hand to a finger loop. The pants have an invisible crotch zipper, so you actually can pee in this outfit without having to take off the corset to get your britches up and down.

I snapped a bunch of pictures and put them in a online album, here. So check it out if you're interested.

This outfit was custom-made for me, so it’s not exactly a standard size. I would say I was a big six or a small eight when this was made. The pants are very stretchy, and of course the corset is very much adjustable. Exact dimensions of all the pieces are as follows:

The wings are 44 inches wide and 32 tall.

The tail is 8 inches wide and 28 inches long.

The waist of the boned bustier seems to be about 29 inches when it’s all the way closed. But as it laces, it could accommodate a waist several inches bigger. If you’re bigger than a D-cup, you might spill over the top some, but if you’re smaller than that you’ll probably be fine.

Laid flat, the waist of the pants seems to be about 14 inches, and when stretched out, about 16. They're designed to fit like leggings.

Email me with a reasonable offer, tell me how much you'd love wearing it, and it’s yours.

Complete and unedited email from the inbox….

I, 25, years old, nice, one, young, male, slave, I am sitting down turkey I,
machine, technician work, Your, *Web, page, visit, and, me, a lot of,
influence, All, life, your, slave, toilet, and, prostitute, Become, only,
for_you, work, spend, want, For this , what must I do? I am serious in this
subject I do for you in the prostitution Young, and, beautifull, I will in
the joint send my picture I accept your all rules Beg, me, all, one, life,
Slave, dog, toilet, become, honour, present
Good, one, driver, cooking, and, garden, business, very good,
Really, serious, beg, me, service, take,

Wow. I thought I liked commas. I understand that he’s probably using an online translator that could turn Shakespeare into shlock, but what’s with all those commas? Does he stutter in real life?

I’m also wondering about the phrase “in the joint”. He’s in prison? I didn’t know Turkish prisoners got web access. Things have changed since Midnight Express, apparently.

I was unaware that Turkish men were such impressive multitaskers. I mean, he’s asking to be my slave/technician/prostitute/dog/toilet/driver/cook/gardener. That’s a lot of hats.

And pretty disparate hats, too. You would want to be sure not to overlap, say, cooking duties and toilet duties. Combining toilet and driver would probably go badly, too. (“Oh, hi, Officer. Mind the puddle, there.”) Toilet and gardener could work together okay, I suppose. But I would also avoid toilet and technician. If you’ve ever pissed on an electric fence, you’ll understand why. Toilet and prostitute? Hmmn, could work, with certain clients. But others might get - yes, I’m going to say it – pissy! (Oh, I just crack myself up sometimes.)

All snarkiness aside, though…If you ignore some of the commas, there’s kind of a lilt to snippets of this, an odd sort of poetry. “Only for you, work, spend, want…” and “Beg me, all one life…” There’s a bit of rhythm.

But I don’t think I want a young Turkish man to come to Seattle and be my slave of all trades. He’ll have to write translator poetry to someone else.

Busy day yesterday: I went with Monk for his check-in with the doctor about his broken collarbone. (It's healing just fine, although these things never go as fast as one would like.) Then I spent a charming two hours tormenting a sweet man of my acquaintance, and after that I showered, changed clothes, and had dinner with my mother and her husband. Kinda one of those all-over-the-map days.

I’m also in the middle of a closet purge. Given that I’ve been getting a lot of new clothes lately, I felt it only right that I should get rid of a bunch. So, eBay, here I come. Here’s a link to what I have listed so far. It’s just the tip of the iceberg, I have several dozen more items. In this ginormous pile of stuff is fetishwear, street clothes, shoes and boots, some corsets, a couple of outrageous fetish costumes from a local fashion designer, all kinds of things. I’ll be putting up new items every few days until it’s gone, just so I don’t get stuck trying ship out everything at once. So keep checking back there.

Oh, and – the new column. Sticky sweet goodness….

Well, this is...interesting: platform shoes with built-in alarms for sex workers.

Given that more women are assaulted by husbands, boyfriends or family members than strangers on the street, ideas like this always make me scratch my head a little. It seems more appropriate to give them to women who’ve filed restraining orders against stalkers.

Plus, how long would the time lag be between a sex worker signaling that they were in trouble, and someone getting to them? I would imagine it’s going to be long enough to get hurt rather badly, if that’s what the other person’s intent was. (Handheld alarms designed to scare attackers away already exist, so you don't need these shoes for that feature.)

These shoes remind me of the call in/call out security system that some outcall ladies use. It usually works like this: you call a designated third person when you arrive at the location and you’re with the client, they call you back when it’s time to leave, and then you call them back when you’re safely outside and away.

There’s nothing wrong with that system as far as it goes, but if someone means to hurt you, neither phone calls nor these shoes will stop them. All it does is give the police an idea where to start looking for your body, however many days later.

I say that last sentence with an ironic twist to my lips that isn’t quite a smile. The idea that all sex workers live in minute-to-minute peril is a myth propagated by a society that doesn’t want women getting any dangerous ideas about what they are allowed to do with their bodies. In the well-over-ten years I've been in the sex industry, I can count on one hand the number of times I've felt like I was in real danger from a client. And none of those times ended with an actual assault. Was that fate, luck, divine intervention, my skillful handling of the situation, or was the danger just my imagination? I don't know. I will never know. I just know it hasn't happened.

However, a certain number of sex workers do get beaten or killed every year. Unfortunately, they are very frequently the most desperate of women, working on the street and often living on it. They are likely to be dealing with a substance addiction as well. Those high-tech shoes wouldn’t last a day before they were either stolen or traded away for money or drugs. Thus, those who need them the most are the least likely to have them. Sad but true.

I Got The Music In Me

For a while now, I’ve been meaning to blog about my severe case of what I call “Musical-Tourettes Syndrone”. But I hadn’t quite found the right way to describe exactly what I meant. So imagine my surprise when I found out that apparently, Stranger editor Christopher Frizzelle has Musical-Tourettes, too. He doesn’t call it that, but what he says is exactly what I do.

“There's a glitch in my brain that constantly scans what people say for references to the adult-contemporary-pop canon of my childhood, and if a friend says, "I'm tired," it's not unheard of for me to reply, no doubt obnoxiously, "I'm tired of play-ay-ing on the team/Oh, it seems I don't get time out anymore/Ooh-ooh-ooh." If someone says, "Here she comes," I will say, "Watch out, boy, she'll chew you up." Whenever I come across the word "wordplay," my mind sings: "You play with words/You play with luh-uh-uhve."

Mr. Frizzelle is speaking specifically of Hall and Oates songs - I don’t know if he does this all the time, with all different kinds of music. But I do.

I’m kidding about it being an actual disorder, of course, it’s not really. It’s just this really absurd habit, but it is pretty deeply ingrained in me. I have trained myself not to do it out loud in front of anyone but Monk. (Unless I have been drinking champagne, and then all bets are off.) I thought I was the only person silly enough to ever do it out loud, so I was quite delighted when I found that, if encouraged, Monk will do it, too.

And it’s silly enough even when other people can actually recognize the music. Part of my problem is that because I was a theatre major, I have lyrics from various musicals that I worked on/performed in forever etched into my head. No one else but another theater geek knows the lyrics to "Fugue for Tinhorns" from Guys and Dolls, but if you say to me, “Can do, Matisse”, in my head I’ll start singing “I got the horse right here, his name is Paul Revere, and here's a guy who says if the weather's clear, can do, can do, this guy says the horse can do.” If someone remarks in my presence “Just you wait”, then mentally, I hear Eliza Doolittle singing “Just you wait, Henry Higgens, just you wait, you’ll be sorry but your tears will come too late…” And I must firmly repress the urge to sing along.

Aside from musicals, it’s mostly unintentional quoting from seventies and eighties songs that brings on my little tic. I think it’s true that music from your childhood really get imprinted on you. So if you’re ever talking to me, and I suddenly look distracted and seem to be singing under my breath, feel free to join right in - if you know the words.

Edited to add: Now that I mention it, I do see one theatre-loving man who knows the same musical cues and does this right along with me. It really adds something unique to a BDSM scene when both of you occasionally break into a Rogers and Hammerstein chorus.