On January 29, a team of burlesque performers will read pulp fiction classics straight “from Gotham’s seedy underbelly.” The readers will not be wearing any clothes.
The event is part of the “Naked Girls Reading” series that hosts performances around the country. GalleyCat caught up with founder Michelle L’amour (pictured via her NSFW site) to find out more about the bare-skinned literary event.
L’amour spoke of the pulp fiction show she hosted in Chicago recently: “We actually did ours as a brunch, we served pulp orange juice and other silly things like that. We read Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Nelson Algren. Algren is local to Chicago–I read the story, “How the Devil Comes Down Division Street” which is a really dark story.”
She continued: “We also had the audience pick their favorite cover and read those books … There was a book called “The Naked Diver,” with a woman on the front struggling with kelp. In the scene we read from this book, a guy was watching her struggle and discussing her body–rather than helping her.”
She concluded: “One of the most magical, moving events when we did poetry. I know it sounds kind of cliche, but I don’t think you hear poetry read aloud enough, especially by naked women. One of my other favorites was bedtime stories. I finished with ‘Goodnight Moon.’ It’s nice, but wrong, to read a children’s book to adults naked … I don’t think it works quite as well with men, but I don’t have a philosophical reason for that.”