Marc Kenison was taking his clothes off, slowly, in a bare concrete
room. Cyndi Lauper, Margaret Cho, Carson Kressley, and Fred
Schneider—of the B-52s—were watching. “It wasn’t what I’d
imagined stripping for the B-52s would be like,” Kenison says. “Not in
an unsexy, fluorescent-lit room like that. But Cyndi Lauper sounded
exactly like Cyndi Lauper. Which I somehow wasn’t expecting.”
Not that he ever expected to strip for pop stars. Or for anyone.
Kenison studied ballet and modern dance at Juilliard. He danced with
the prestigious José Limón Company for six years,
performing in Sarajevo, El Salvador, and for President Clinton. He
earned an MFA in acting from the University of Washington and cofounded
Washington Ensemble Theatre (WET), which raised the bar for fringe
theater in Seattle.
But his career as a queer burlesque dancer had its high-water
mark—so far—in that dingy concrete room backstage at the
WaMu Theater. (It was a birthday present for Schneider from
Kressley.)
That career started in September 2006, while Kenison was rehearsing
The Museum Play at WET. Some unspecified backstage drama made it
a stressful experience, and Kenison, with the encouragement of a New
York friend and burlesque star named Dirty Martini, took a burlesque
class as a way to relax. He was the only man in the class and says he
felt nervous, like he was intruding. But he was—as you’d expect
from a Juilliard graduate—excellent.
“We immediately cast him in our annual Burlesque Nutcracker at the Triple Door,” says his teacher, who performs under the name Miss
Indigo Blue. “He’s so composed onstage and his charisma is amazing.
It’s campy and electric and incredibly sexy and coy. And I almost want
to say a little bit
slutty.” (She gave “slutty” a sliding
intonation
that is impossible to reproduce in print: It sounded
like the momentary intrusion of a phone-sex operator.)
During the class, Kenison worked up his “buttons” routine, one of
Indigo Blue’s favorites. He enters as a vain, prissy dandy, covered in
shiny buttons. Enter the leather daddy, who takes him down a few pegs.
The daddy disciplines him (via flogging), reducing him to (sated)
humility. Indigo still chuckles at the memory.
Around the time Kenison was creating the buttons routine, the
reviews for Museum Play started appearing. In this paper, Annie
Wagner described Kenison as “waxy.” He embraced the unflattering
adjective as his burlesque stage name: Waxie Moon.
Kenison looks like a dancer: tall and lean with long limbs and taut
muscles. He says he hasn’t worked out in years, that he can barely
touch his toes anymore. It’s difficult to believe him. He speaks in a
quiet, almost shy voice, though Waxie Moon is anything but shy.
Onstage, she (he? it?—the pronouns are perilous) gambols, coos,
and when she doesn’t get her way, she roars.
She also talks, a radical idea for burlesque, at least in Seattle.
The burlesque form has only one requirement. In Indigo Blue’s words:
“Person enters with some clothes, magic happens, person exits with less
clothes.” Most burlesque dancers don’t do much more than that: They
develop a cutesy character, a simple storyline, and they strip.
There’s nothing cutesy about Waxie Moon. She has several personae,
from ’70s
mustache-and-jeans stripper to cross-gender fan
dancer—but the dominant character is a pathetic diva. She doesn’t
seduce; she demands. Her foil is a mute character in a harlequin outfit
(played by Wes Hurley) who serves as dresser, boy toy, and punching
bag.
“She’s a monster,” says Jennifer Zeyl, another WET cofounder. (Both
she and Kenison have since left the company.) “But Waxie wants to be
loved for being a monster. If everybody could scratch every itch they
ever had, in public, they’d be Waxie.”
Kenison has performed as Waxie Moon at the Triple Door, the Pink
Door, and the now-razed Pony, and is beginning to move from clubs into
theaters. In a performance for this summer’s Northwest New Works
festival at On the Boards, Waxie introduced something new to burlesque:
pathos.
Waxie has family legends. The best is about Diana Ross, Waxie’s
spirit animal. In 1983, during a Central Park performance, as Ross sang
“Reach Out and Touch Somebody’s Hand,” she stretched her arms toward
the crowd while holding the microphone away from her mouth, admonishing
the front rows, “Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!”
“That seems kind of like Waxie at her most diva-ish to me,” says
Kenison. It symbolizes Waxie’s variation on the well-worn themes of
burlesque. Stripping requires an illusion of intimacy, the belief that
the naked body wants to draw you close. Waxie Moon—stripper,
diva, monster—wants to push you away.
