SPONGE BATHS BACKSTAGE AT THE BURLESQUE

Yo, hello. This is Minnie talkin'. I'm gonna tell ya how I got sucked into this racket. I was doin' the 'doctor' sketch one week. The comics liked workin' wiff me, 'cause I had a good memory and never flubbed my lines. That...plus the fact that I fit into this 'break-away' dress they had and my boobies heaved up and down real nice everytime that ugly, hunchback, ape of a comic started feelin' 'em up wiff his dime-store stethescope. I'd go 'oh, doctor, what can possibly be wrong wiff me?'...And the ape, bastid would make wiff a bush league, Groucho Marx leer, turn to the audience and say---'nuttin' that I can't fix.'.....Then I'd get 'probed' all over. He'd find like a rubber chicken, plus a whole bunch a other crap, hidin' up in my nooks and crannies, pull the shit out, hold it up to the people in the seats and make faces. Look, high art it was not.

But one night, I'm sittin' backstage drinkin' an Irish Coffee, when one a the grips comes over and hands me this note. The headliner wants to see me in her dressing room. I figure like maybe she needs to borrow somethin', like talcum powder or a jar a Odorona (a big deodorant brand back then), or a toenail clipper...you know. So I get up, adjust my g-string (accidental exposures are very common in our line of work...'runaway beavers,' we call 'em), press down a droopy pasty and go knock on her door. She says 'enter.' She don't say 'come in,' like no normal person, just 'enter,' like she thinks she's Mata Hari or a God damn European or something. You know what I mean?

So I go in and she's sittin' there, starin' into the mirror and smokin' this humongus goof butt. smelled like good stuff too. Now the fact that she's buck naked didn't bother me much. I figured like maybe she rinsed out her doo-dads and they ain't dried yet. She motions for me to sit down and I do. The place was so heaped with crap, I almost squashed her little Pomeranian. Lucky it nipped my ass. I jumped. She laughed, held out her hand and offered me a drag on that carefully rolled goof butt a hers. Not wanting to be rude, I obliged. We alternated tokes for about a few hundred heartbeats (a vampire term) and the next thing I know, I'm givin' her a warm sponge bath, liked she's being prepped for gynecological surgery or somethin'.

Did I notice her fangs? Yeah, to be truthful, I did. But a lot a the girls had 'bad' teef. Times were tough. So I looked the other way. Snaggle-toothed bitches were more common back then.  Dentists don't help people outta the goodness a their hearts, you know. Hell, they even had a club-foot girl in the chorus. Who was I  to judge?...Look, I gotta stop now. My show is on.  Poker After Dark is on. Come back another night and I'll tell ya more....