Music to strip to Radio 4
Seasonal tonic Radio Scotland
One arm, one leg and a tassle twirl ... if you’re not huffing and puffing by the end of your burlesque routine then you’re clearly not doing any work.
Music to strip to featured modern burlesque dancers – Nasty Canasta and Tigger, a woman who called herself “the girl with the 44 Double D brain” and the other who declared: “ I’m a queer Jew from New York.”
Sixty years ago, striptease music was jazzy, but that was then. Hey girl, get with the times!
We got into a class: “Shimmy, shimmy,” cried the teacher. There was plenty of good advice. “Keep looking back - obviously no-one pays to just look at your back!”
The message was about fun and feeling good. You can be pushing a supermarket trolley in the supermarket and hear a tune and think, hey, I could strip to that.
A sassy woman said: “I wanna dance to Lady Gaga with coke cans in my hair,” so she did.
Apparently a raised eyebrow can say 1,000 words – wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more.
Tigger loves burlesque but he detests that song Barbie girl in a Barbie world, it’s a never, never ever from him.
This was a show guaranteed to loosen up a Radio 4 audience, tassel-in-yer-face style.
In case you’re living in a parallel universe, it’s getting colder and darker out there.
Judith Leask has Seasonal Affective Disorder. It’s like a depression, you feel dark and isolated.
Her light box has helped.
“I still get slumps in the winter, it’s not like a miracle cure, but it really helps,” she told Radio Scotland.
People tell you to eat healthily and go out for a run but when you’re really low that is the last thing you want to do, she said.
Still, her light box floods the room with light and she’s not having the hellish winters she used to know.
It was heartening information, no miracle cure but a little hope.
“I’m not skipping gaily through the snowy streets all winter,” she said, “But I’m certainly walking through the streets with my head held higher.”
