Salon Wanderlust | Angela, the Upside-Down Girl

[Salon Wanderlust: Travel with a passion]

T A B L E_T A L K
How have you acquired new languages? Discuss travel and foreign speak in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y
My junior year abroad
By Edith Pearlman
A 60-year-old's adventures in a classroom called Jerusalem
(08/26/98)
My Hawaiian honeymoon
By Cintra Wilson
Of a 1,300-pound pop-ukulele star, teenage bikini queens and the best wave on earth
(08/25/98)
Sex, death and beauty in South America
By Melanie Goldman
Week Two of the Camel Trophy
(08/24/98)
Oh when the gays come dancing in
By Rebecca Bryant
The physical -- and emotional -- revelations of Amsterdam's Gay Games V
(08/21/98)
The view from Japan
By Dave McCombs
It's the economy, not the morality
(08/20/98)

Browse the
Wanderlust Passages archives

ANGELA, THE UPSIDE-DOWN GIRL | PAGE 1, 2
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
During that first year, when I was learning the cadences of New England and of adult work, my first true neighbor was the woman who lived on the first floor of the house on Shore Drive. Her name was Angela -- Angela the Upside-Down Girl -- and she was a famous stripper in a nightclub in the Combat Zone, a part of the city that has since been urban-planned away. Angela's stage name derived from her specialty, which was to completely strip while in a headstand. Offstage and right side up, Angela was a single mother with two children, a boy of about eleven and a girl of eight.
Many afternoons Angela's boy and I walked along the beach in front of the house on Shore Drive. He had very smooth skin and the plump oval shape of a seal, and he often wore a sweater without a shirt underneath -- which made you think about the itchy fibers against his soft, mammalian skin. He spoke to me in a way no one his age has, before or since, as if I sorely needed instruction and he had that information. All forceful personalities could claim influence on my life at that time and I had never met such an assured boy, who seemed not quite a boy. The main thing that Angela's son wanted to impress upon me was the supreme importance of being, not earnest, but limber. "Limber" was the word he used, which he had learned from his mother. He had learned everything, he said, from his mother. Gymnastics were very important, he told me. He was studying gymnastics so he would be limber and flexible like his mother. Was I studying gymnastics? Had I when I was little? It was best to learn while still a child, but he thought it might not be too late.

The first time that I visited Angela's apartment was by chance; we needed to borrow a cup of something. "Sure, hon, come in." But before getting the flour or the sugar, Angela ushered me directly into her living room and gestured for me to sit on a furry white couch in front of the dominant feature of the room, which was an immense painting over the mantelpiece. The painting was done on a field of black velvet and portrayed Angela as reclining odalisque, naked save for a pair of red high heels and a diaphanous bit of veil over her arms. The painting had been a surprise, a gift from a group of admirers who had apparently modeled the pose after Ingres's languid, long-backed harem slave of 1894, the original of which hangs in the Louvre. I knew that painting, if only as a slide projected in the lecture hall. Whatever the painting on velvet lacked of Ingres's neoclassical technique -- and in truth, that might be all -- it made up for in palpable presence. It was a good likeness and there was no doubt that it was Angela, perhaps an Angela of ten years earlier. Other than the black background and red shoes, the colors were pinks and white-pinks, less pearly than those of Ingres, and instead of his blue satin drapery and peacock feather fan, a bamboo leaf motif played over two sides like a vignetting fringe. Around the painting was a frame of black enameled wood, and around the frame was a string of miniature colored Christmas tree lights.
Angela told me that she did not turn on the Christmas tree lights except on special occasions, one of which was now. She waited until her guest was seated in the living room in front of the painting and then snapped on the lights so one could appreciate the change in the overall effect. It was a good overall effect before the lights were switched on, and with them -- "Boy, oh boy" and "Holy cow" are things people might have said, if they could think of anything to say at all.
Angela loved the painting, and though one can imagine a child psychologist's unsmiling caveats, I think her kids did too. What was it but the image of the body that kept their lives together, that made their home, that generated food and clothes and heat, that made their universe spin? The emblem ornamented by lights over the hearth was, like its patrician cousins, plainly a shrine to the lady of the house, here Aphrodite as working woman. As with all shrines, there was an inevitable distance between the image and the belief it embodied. None of us is identical with our bodies, and Angela was not one with the body in the painting, and so she was free to look on it as she did -- with pride and detachment, as when a magnate gazes at a picture of his fortunate manufactory, or a captain on a rendering of a favorite sloop.

Never once did Angela refer to herself as a stripper, but always as a gymnast or gymnastic dancer. The club, she explained, was the best place for a gymnastic dancer to earn steady money, which steady money affirmed the central mythos of her household: that to be limber and gymnastic is a powerful tool, a ticket in this world, like math or grammar. "Have you had any gymnastic training?" she asked me the first time we had coffee. Like her son, Angela looked sad when I said that I had not. Being tear-gassed in protest marches, lied to by Presidents, and seeing a city burn for a prophet's death had been one kind of education, but none of that was yet knowledge of what could make Angela say, "It's a good job, hon. I'm the headliner."
One day Angela issued me an invitation, the first formal social invitation I would receive in New England. My roommates and I and our dates were to be her guests at the club where she was the star performer. She would like us to come Saturday night for the main show at ten o'clock. We arrived at the club a little early, as Angela had asked us to, and she came out from her dressing room and introduced us to the club manager, who was gruff in a not avuncular but just plain gruff way. Angela also introduced us to the bartender, to one of the other performers, and later, during her act, pointed us out to the other customers as "my neighbors, who are just out of school." I saw that we were a novelty mix of mascot and country mice, that we were bits of paint on Angela's palette that night, adding to her star, and I felt confused and glad. She was, I believe, on the verge of asking us to stand up and say where we came from, like visitors to a new church.
For her act, Angela wore a lime-green and black costume, net stockings, and elbow-length lime-green evening gloves -- apparel of a splendor greatly beyond (as was one Hester Prynne's) and yet of considerably less coverage than that approved by what Hawthorne called the "sumptuary regulations of the colony." There was a jazz drummer who played while Angela performed, and some music on a record player. The runway was set behind the bar and elevated, so that the audience looked up slightly to Angela's body.
Outside the club it was August; when we had arrived the heat of the day was just giving way as a tangy fog drifted in from the sea and settled into the canyon close of the city's sheer, high walls. Inside, the club was air-conditioned, smoky, chromed and mirrored, and jammed with middle-aged men in sports shirts. Angela was completely at home upside down, rock-steady during the whole act: rising swiftly into a headstand, bumping to the drum, slowly pulling off her stockings one by one, then unzipping her costume and somehow removing it too. There were spangled pasties on her breasts, with long beads that hung down toward her face. I remember thinking, as everyone must have, a good deal about how she was accomplishing the whole thing. It seemed a foregone conclusion that she would be both upside down and naked at some point, but how this would actually occur was a source less of erotic tease than of sheer logistical drama and suspense.
Even though she was a pro, one worried for Angela the whole time, the way one does for a tightrope walker at the circus: Would she lose her balance? Would she manage zipper and garter snaps? For this line of work, Angela was no longer young; she was already half the soft, lined roué, and to engage in a nightly drama to defeat gravity was not merely a career-extending technique but a production that touched and tickled her audiences. At some moment in her act one could feel the tenor of the room shifting, the audience aware of another pitch. I won't insist that it was art with a capital A, but it was something rather like it. She was not so much a transcendentalist pointing to an ideal beyond the world of experience, as she was an inversionist, transforming by reversals within the all too real. Do I navigate the fine line about this life? It was hard, and redolent of limitation, but of little she made much. The applause started even before she had finished her routine, and when she threw out the final bit of apparel -- two thin boas that had been coiled around her arms -- that was the finale, and the middle-aged men in sports shirts stood up and cheered.

After her act, Angela had drinks sent to us on the house, whatever we wanted. The star came by our table and flirted with our boyfriends. She stayed in character all the while she was at the club; she was none of the other Angelas I had seen -- in her kitchen boiling spaghetti, on the seawall smoking, at the door bundling her daughter for school. She was only the exotic gymnast of the Kit Kat Club whose name appeared on a sign in the window -- not only the A, but all of the letters of her name scarlet letters, with flourishes of gold sparkles for shadows. The headliner may have seemed to some a woman whose career was a deviant offense to the moral order. But the ground of the city on the hill had thawed some since Hawthorne worried about idealism calcified, about the dark side of a high moral vision. It had room for Angela, although it did ask her, like the refractory beauty of old, to dwell apart, and by the sea on a margin of town.
As our boyfriends flirted back with Angela, they wavered between gallantry and sophomoric humor, an awkward blend that they could not quite master. Angela was unfazed; she addressed the boyfriends like downy teenagers, then shared a laugh with them like flaneurs and compatriots of the demi-monde, then commanded the hushed attention due a grande dame. We were guests in her salon, and when we left in the early morning she saw us to the door, beyond which stood a bouncer in an electric-blue suit, and she blew us kisses. The light over the door of the club was yellow, and the neon of the blinking club sign was purple, and these two complementary colors pulsed alternately over our faces while we stood in the entrance saying good-night. Then we walked out into a thin fog that diffused the lights of the clubs and caused their hot pinks, blues, and yellows to seep into the moist gray air as water colors seep into prepared paper.

A few weeks later, someone in our house awoke in the middle of the night, startled by sound. Rising from her bed, she walked down the hall to a row of windows, outside of which there lay a rustling black sea and a party of carousing teenagers, boys and girls dancing on the wide seawall. A radio was playing -- it sounded like a song about saying good-bye to rubies and days. The tide was coming in, beginning to break over a clump of boulders, and there was a fetid salt smell from the beds of knotted wrack that blanketed the beach, each tangle fixed to its rock by a simple holdfast. A finger nail clipping of moon floated just inches above the waterline, a snip about to slide away. Threading the hallway to the window, the person had guessed -- and now as she looked out on the night she was really sure -- that she had no idea what place this might be. Her body, too, was unfamiliar, not unappealing, only unknown: a form into which she had recently arrived, from where she could not say. There was no name to call herself. The clock hands said the hour, but not a year. The suspended woman stood long at the window, unafraid but feeling entirely stripped, outside time and space. Was the sea the same sea? How had she arrived here, to see a night brawling by a body of water? What rooms had led to this window? And why such a monstrous lamp on the ceiling?
SALON | Aug. 27, 1998
Emily Hiestand is the author of "The Very Rich Hours: Travels in Orkney, Belize, the Everglades, and Greece" and a collection of poems, "Green the Witch-Hazel Wood." She lives in Cambridge, Mass.
Reprinted from "Angela the Upside-Down Girl" by Emily Hiestand. Copyright © 1998 by Emily Hiestand. By permission of Beacon Press, Boston.


	T A B L E_T A L K How have you acquired new languages? Discuss travel and foreign speak in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y My junior year abroad By Edith Pearlman A 60-year-old's adventures in a classroom called Jerusalem (08/26/98) My Hawaiian honeymoon By Cintra Wilson Of a 1,300-pound pop-ukulele star, teenage bikini queens and the best wave on earth (08/25/98) Sex, death and beauty in South America By Melanie Goldman Week Two of the Camel Trophy (08/24/98) Oh when the gays come dancing in By Rebecca Bryant The physical -- and emotional -- revelations of Amsterdam's Gay Games V (08/21/98) The view from Japan By Dave McCombs It's the economy, not the morality (08/20/98) Browse the Wanderlust Passages archives		ANGELA, THE UPSIDE-DOWN GIRL \| PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - During that first year, when I was learning the cadences of New England and of adult work, my first true neighbor was the woman who lived on the first floor of the house on Shore Drive. Her name was Angela -- Angela the Upside-Down Girl -- and she was a famous stripper in a nightclub in the Combat Zone, a part of the city that has since been urban-planned away. Angela's stage name derived from her specialty, which was to completely strip while in a headstand. Offstage and right side up, Angela was a single mother with two children, a boy of about eleven and a girl of eight. Many afternoons Angela's boy and I walked along the beach in front of the house on Shore Drive. He had very smooth skin and the plump oval shape of a seal, and he often wore a sweater without a shirt underneath -- which made you think about the itchy fibers against his soft, mammalian skin. He spoke to me in a way no one his age has, before or since, as if I sorely needed instruction and he had that information. All forceful personalities could claim influence on my life at that time and I had never met such an assured boy, who seemed not quite a boy. The main thing that Angela's son wanted to impress upon me was the supreme importance of being, not earnest, but limber. "Limber" was the word he used, which he had learned from his mother. He had learned everything, he said, from his mother. Gymnastics were very important, he told me. He was studying gymnastics so he would be limber and flexible like his mother. Was I studying gymnastics? Had I when I was little? It was best to learn while still a child, but he thought it might not be too late. The first time that I visited Angela's apartment was by chance; we needed to borrow a cup of something. "Sure, hon, come in." But before getting the flour or the sugar, Angela ushered me directly into her living room and gestured for me to sit on a furry white couch in front of the dominant feature of the room, which was an immense painting over the mantelpiece. The painting was done on a field of black velvet and portrayed Angela as reclining odalisque, naked save for a pair of red high heels and a diaphanous bit of veil over her arms. The painting had been a surprise, a gift from a group of admirers who had apparently modeled the pose after Ingres's languid, long-backed harem slave of 1894, the original of which hangs in the Louvre. I knew that painting, if only as a slide projected in the lecture hall. Whatever the painting on velvet lacked of Ingres's neoclassical technique -- and in truth, that might be all -- it made up for in palpable presence. It was a good likeness and there was no doubt that it was Angela, perhaps an Angela of ten years earlier. Other than the black background and red shoes, the colors were pinks and white-pinks, less pearly than those of Ingres, and instead of his blue satin drapery and peacock feather fan, a bamboo leaf motif played over two sides like a vignetting fringe. Around the painting was a frame of black enameled wood, and around the frame was a string of miniature colored Christmas tree lights. Angela told me that she did not turn on the Christmas tree lights except on special occasions, one of which was now. She waited until her guest was seated in the living room in front of the painting and then snapped on the lights so one could appreciate the change in the overall effect. It was a good overall effect before the lights were switched on, and with them -- "Boy, oh boy" and "Holy cow" are things people might have said, if they could think of anything to say at all. Angela loved the painting, and though one can imagine a child psychologist's unsmiling caveats, I think her kids did too. What was it but the image of the body that kept their lives together, that made their home, that generated food and clothes and heat, that made their universe spin? The emblem ornamented by lights over the hearth was, like its patrician cousins, plainly a shrine to the lady of the house, here Aphrodite as working woman. As with all shrines, there was an inevitable distance between the image and the belief it embodied. None of us is identical with our bodies, and Angela was not one with the body in the painting, and so she was free to look on it as she did -- with pride and detachment, as when a magnate gazes at a picture of his fortunate manufactory, or a captain on a rendering of a favorite sloop. Never once did Angela refer to herself as a stripper, but always as a gymnast or gymnastic dancer. The club, she explained, was the best place for a gymnastic dancer to earn steady money, which steady money affirmed the central mythos of her household: that to be limber and gymnastic is a powerful tool, a ticket in this world, like math or grammar. "Have you had any gymnastic training?" she asked me the first time we had coffee. Like her son, Angela looked sad when I said that I had not. Being tear-gassed in protest marches, lied to by Presidents, and seeing a city burn for a prophet's death had been one kind of education, but none of that was yet knowledge of what could make Angela say, "It's a good job, hon. I'm the headliner." One day Angela issued me an invitation, the first formal social invitation I would receive in New England. My roommates and I and our dates were to be her guests at the club where she was the star performer. She would like us to come Saturday night for the main show at ten o'clock. We arrived at the club a little early, as Angela had asked us to, and she came out from her dressing room and introduced us to the club manager, who was gruff in a not avuncular but just plain gruff way. Angela also introduced us to the bartender, to one of the other performers, and later, during her act, pointed us out to the other customers as "my neighbors, who are just out of school." I saw that we were a novelty mix of mascot and country mice, that we were bits of paint on Angela's palette that night, adding to her star, and I felt confused and glad. She was, I believe, on the verge of asking us to stand up and say where we came from, like visitors to a new church. For her act, Angela wore a lime-green and black costume, net stockings, and elbow-length lime-green evening gloves -- apparel of a splendor greatly beyond (as was one Hester Prynne's) and yet of considerably less coverage than that approved by what Hawthorne called the "sumptuary regulations of the colony." There was a jazz drummer who played while Angela performed, and some music on a record player. The runway was set behind the bar and elevated, so that the audience looked up slightly to Angela's body. Outside the club it was August; when we had arrived the heat of the day was just giving way as a tangy fog drifted in from the sea and settled into the canyon close of the city's sheer, high walls. Inside, the club was air-conditioned, smoky, chromed and mirrored, and jammed with middle-aged men in sports shirts. Angela was completely at home upside down, rock-steady during the whole act: rising swiftly into a headstand, bumping to the drum, slowly pulling off her stockings one by one, then unzipping her costume and somehow removing it too. There were spangled pasties on her breasts, with long beads that hung down toward her face. I remember thinking, as everyone must have, a good deal about how she was accomplishing the whole thing. It seemed a foregone conclusion that she would be both upside down and naked at some point, but how this would actually occur was a source less of erotic tease than of sheer logistical drama and suspense. Even though she was a pro, one worried for Angela the whole time, the way one does for a tightrope walker at the circus: Would she lose her balance? Would she manage zipper and garter snaps? For this line of work, Angela was no longer young; she was already half the soft, lined roué, and to engage in a nightly drama to defeat gravity was not merely a career-extending technique but a production that touched and tickled her audiences. At some moment in her act one could feel the tenor of the room shifting, the audience aware of another pitch. I won't insist that it was art with a capital A, but it was something rather like it. She was not so much a transcendentalist pointing to an ideal beyond the world of experience, as she was an inversionist, transforming by reversals within the all too real. Do I navigate the fine line about this life? It was hard, and redolent of limitation, but of little she made much. The applause started even before she had finished her routine, and when she threw out the final bit of apparel -- two thin boas that had been coiled around her arms -- that was the finale, and the middle-aged men in sports shirts stood up and cheered. After her act, Angela had drinks sent to us on the house, whatever we wanted. The star came by our table and flirted with our boyfriends. She stayed in character all the while she was at the club; she was none of the other Angelas I had seen -- in her kitchen boiling spaghetti, on the seawall smoking, at the door bundling her daughter for school. She was only the exotic gymnast of the Kit Kat Club whose name appeared on a sign in the window -- not only the A, but all of the letters of her name scarlet letters, with flourishes of gold sparkles for shadows. The headliner may have seemed to some a woman whose career was a deviant offense to the moral order. But the ground of the city on the hill had thawed some since Hawthorne worried about idealism calcified, about the dark side of a high moral vision. It had room for Angela, although it did ask her, like the refractory beauty of old, to dwell apart, and by the sea on a margin of town. As our boyfriends flirted back with Angela, they wavered between gallantry and sophomoric humor, an awkward blend that they could not quite master. Angela was unfazed; she addressed the boyfriends like downy teenagers, then shared a laugh with them like flaneurs and compatriots of the demi-monde, then commanded the hushed attention due a grande dame. We were guests in her salon, and when we left in the early morning she saw us to the door, beyond which stood a bouncer in an electric-blue suit, and she blew us kisses. The light over the door of the club was yellow, and the neon of the blinking club sign was purple, and these two complementary colors pulsed alternately over our faces while we stood in the entrance saying good-night. Then we walked out into a thin fog that diffused the lights of the clubs and caused their hot pinks, blues, and yellows to seep into the moist gray air as water colors seep into prepared paper. A few weeks later, someone in our house awoke in the middle of the night, startled by sound. Rising from her bed, she walked down the hall to a row of windows, outside of which there lay a rustling black sea and a party of carousing teenagers, boys and girls dancing on the wide seawall. A radio was playing -- it sounded like a song about saying good-bye to rubies and days. The tide was coming in, beginning to break over a clump of boulders, and there was a fetid salt smell from the beds of knotted wrack that blanketed the beach, each tangle fixed to its rock by a simple holdfast. A finger nail clipping of moon floated just inches above the waterline, a snip about to slide away. Threading the hallway to the window, the person had guessed -- and now as she looked out on the night she was really sure -- that she had no idea what place this might be. Her body, too, was unfamiliar, not unappealing, only unknown: a form into which she had recently arrived, from where she could not say. There was no name to call herself. The clock hands said the hour, but not a year. The suspended woman stood long at the window, unafraid but feeling entirely stripped, outside time and space. Was the sea the same sea? How had she arrived here, to see a night brawling by a body of water? What rooms had led to this window? And why such a monstrous lamp on the ceiling? SALON \| Aug. 27, 1998 Emily Hiestand is the author of "The Very Rich Hours: Travels in Orkney, Belize, the Everglades, and Greece" and a collection of poems, "Green the Witch-Hazel Wood." She lives in Cambridge, Mass. Reprinted from "Angela the Upside-Down Girl" by Emily Hiestand. Copyright © 1998 by Emily Hiestand. By permission of Beacon Press, Boston.