I am a Camera

I’ve been tapping into my inner goth girl this week. I have to say I’m totally absorbed with the new Dresden Dolls album Yes, Virginia. And it’s a perfect summer, old chum, to roll your striped stockings down and delve into the punk cabaret. Opera St. Louis is opening the tattered curtain on Kurt Weil’s Street Scene, his “American musical” or Broadway opera that chronicles, as Weil puts it, “love and passion and greed and death -- life in a tenement house between one evening and the next afternoon.” Or for real devastation, mein liebchen, where you can see the bruises on the whores, check out Stages St. Louis production of Cabaret. Oh Sally Bowles and your green nail polish, you’re the “kind of girl who gets your slings and arrows from the dumpster.”

But for those of us who want to get our cabaret au courant, I’m making plans for the swelter of July. Settle into the velvet seats of the HiPointe Theatre and prepare for a night of short films and Dadaist Vaudeville... July 20, The Dresden Dolls will sponsor “F**K the Back Row,” a program of short films submitted by Dresden Dolls fans, vaudeville acts, and a solo performance from la femme Doll Amanda Palmer.

--Jenni

image: Portrait of Anita Berber by Otto Dix