Burlesque sometimes makes for strange bedfellows—a Star Wars-themed performance is an annual local favorite, for example. But something weirder this way comes thanks to a traveling burlesque show inspired by, and set to, the music of Weird Al Yankovic—a show called Al-Stravaganza, which is now the subject of a new documentary film, screening at San Francisco IndieFest this weekend.
Tight & Nerdy is not about Weird Al Yankovic (who notably flipped Chamillionaire’s 2006 gangsta-inspired lyric “ridin’ dirty” into the song “White and Nerdy,” with comedians Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele playing foils to Donny Osmond, Seth Green and Weird “I ain’t got no grille, but I still wear braces” Al in the music video) or burlesque (which has its roots in perversions or “travesties” of high-culture including opera and Shakespeare), but a remarkable hybrid of both.
Weird Al, who rose to fame in the ’80s through goofy, frequently (and inexplicably) food-obsessed music—and music video—parodies of pop heavyweights including Michael Jackson (“Eat It”) and Madonna (“Like a Surgeon”), became both the king of novelty entertainment and pop culture’s reliable, but never mean-spirited, jester. He began disarming audiences and skewering self-serious, highly commercial musical acts and, in doing so, poked fun at the craft of songwriting, celebrity and the very mechanisms of attention and fame.
Al-Stravaganza, the live burlesque show (well, “nerdlesque” show—a subgenre melding striptease with geek culture, sci-fi and comic book fandoms, and cosplay) and subject of Tight & Nerdy (its name taken from the troupe’s name), has its roots in San Francisco, where performers Pickles Kintaro, Mistress Marla Spankx, Pearl E. Gates and Odessa Lil met more than a decade ago. They soon tantalized audiences with DIY showgirl costumes, bawdy choreography, down-to-their-pasties nudity, a vibe of inclusivity across ages, genders and bodies, and, yes, Weird Al songs.
Because what says seduction like Weird Al’s “Spam” (bending REM’s “Stand” into lyrics like “If you need a spoon, keep one around/Carry a thermos to help wash it down”) or “Amish Paradise” (morphing Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” into “As I walk through the valley where I harvest my grain, I take a look at my wife and realize she’s very plain”)?
If Jeff Nucera and Jonathan Ruane, Tight & Nerdy’s filmmakers, capture the backstage thrill and about-to-go-on stress and, as well, the am-I-really-doing-this essence of the troupe’s act onstage—in Jan Brady, Bob Dylan and Oscar the Grouch costumes, and, sometimes, merkins—the heart of the film rapidly reveals itself as something else entirely: the prospect and peril of belonging and not belonging.
Amidst road-trip montages and sequined Spam can strip-teases (yes, featuring a peek-a-boo flap), the filmmakers slip in day-to-day life confessionals from Laura, aka “Pearl,” describing her housewife-induced depression and with an on-a-whim burlesque class serving as savior, and Jann (“Pickles”) chronicling the mundane microaggressions and overt racism of her Korean-American childhood as “the only POC in an all-white world” and an on-again, off-again estrangement with her conservative parents, “not willing to be someone I’m not” to make it work.
And then there’s the confessional of Odessa Lil, her love for a parent notwithstanding, admitting “mixed feelings about how to show compassion for someone who didn’t show me compassion.”
Recalling that she “never really fit in,” Pickles might be speaking for all of these women—outside, that is (however simplified these things can be in compressed, filmic narratives, not to mention compressed film reviews), of the burlesque counter-world they co-create—this expressive, creative, sexually-commanding, body-positive playground where everyone in the audience is in on the kink-meets-camp Weird Al-ness of the whole thing (“They know the words to every song,” Odessa Lil told Weeklys, calling them “our people”).
But if Pickles, Pearl and Mistress Marla Spankx are largely the troupe’s supply of vivaciousness, transporting patrons, with every tit-tassled milkshake, away into this alternate reality, Odessa Lil is its high-concept dominatrix (“I was terrified of her,” says Pickles of her first impression of Lil. Lil’s response? “Good.”), her razor sharp wit as much theatrical dimension as it is existential adaptation.
Lil, whose real name is Audra Wolfmann, a two-time Ms. Noir City—referring to the annual festival that projects rare 35mm prints of classic 1940s-50s noir films at Oakland’s Grand Lake Theatre—punctuates Tight & Nerdy with her trademark, hardboiled dialect. She’s cynical, world-weary, if belied by a hungry, guarded vulnerability, her dialog often in the form of meta-commentary that emphasizes the frequently bizarro nature of existence, socialization and meaning.
Playing tour guide at what she playfully refers to as the “Wolfmann horror house” (notable, as it is, for its horror vacui), Lil points to the dining room-set, gilt framed portraits of “relatives who were killed in the Holocaust” and those from her father’s studio—including (and as faint echo of Lucien Freud’s nudes of his daughter, Annie) kitschy paintings of her as corset and leather crop-accessorized burlesque performer.
She then adds, amongst the sprawl of bric-a-brac assembled by her antique dealer-turned hoarder mother (including a feathered ottoman footstool with high-heeled, mature lady legs) and in her usual self-aware way, “I’m so embarrassed to be alive.” (Wolfmann’s at work on a short story collection loosely based on her life.)
One’s tempted to reach for Jean Baudrillard’s opus on simulacra, probing the way representations of things can precede and even define the things they represent to better understand Wolfmann’s reflexive use of language, the troupe’s appropriation of Weird Al’s music, the burlesque form itself, and Weird Al’s mimicry of and satirical riffs on some of pop culture’s most sacred signals—or at least to wriggle further out on Wolfmann’s “weird loop” wavelength.
Though not in the film, Wolfmann displays in her living room a close friend’s Comic Con fan photo with Star Trek’s William Shatner—the result of successive posed pics, year after year, each featuring the pair and, in hand, their most recent printed photo (picturing, as it does, them and the previous printed photo, and so forth, as a kind of photographic infinity mirror). This is a recursive joke that Shatner indulged, if with raised eyebrow, and plausible shorthand for Odessa Lil’s taste and wit insomuch as it applies to Al-Stravaganza itself.
Tight & Nerdy filmmakers Ruane, who co-produced the Martha Stewart documentary Martha, and Nucera, who had producer roles on The Osbournes and The Baldwins, and who’s been part of Weird Al’s team for years in tour and fan club-related capacities, live and breathe the rhythms of unscripted cinema and bookend these personal revelations and live production scenes with excerpts of interviews with Al himself.
The “Weird” in “Weird Al,” he tells us, came to him as a sledge in his early college years—one that he owned, branded and monetized, parlaying his childhood affinity for the way MAD Magazine skewered contemporary culture into a one man empire that managed to elevate the stature of the world’s nerds, outcasts and weirdos, with MAD’s Alfred E. Neuman reimagined as a musically-inclined, perpetually dad-joking Weird Al (aka, Alfred Yankovic).
Yes, Weird Al was perhaps born to be weird and to carry it off with charm and swag, but he was also destined to be this particular burlesque troupe’s spirit animal.
In the documentary, Mistress Marla Spankx says Weird Al’s oeuvre gives people “permission to be weirdos,” but, importantly, as Al-Stravaganza demonstrates, weirdos together. Weird loops aside, Tight & Nerdy is ultimately about owning one’s weirdness, bonding over it with co-conspirators and—gasp—reveling in it in public, under the lights, probably in homemade Spam can costumes, until off comes the last of one’s disguises, revealing the only self one will ever have in this vast universe.
‘Tight & Nerdy’s’ West Coast premiere is scheduled for Saturday, Feb. 7, 8:30pm, at the 28th San Francisco IndieFest (Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St.), with streaming available during the festival’s run. For more info, visit tightandnerdymovie.com.
