bigmovesbabe
Well-Known Member
Heather MacAllister of Big Burlesque and the Fat-Bottom Revue passed away yesterday at 3:38 p.m. PST after a long and valiant struggle with cancer. Boston-area Big Moves fans surely remember the amazingness of Heather's Fat-Bottom Revue from when they toured here in the summer of 2005 (when Heather had already been living with cancer for 18 months).
Boston-area fatties and their friends and loved ones are invited to a wake for Heather this coming Sunday, February 18, at 6 p.m. at Doyle's Cafe in Jamaica Plain (3484 Washington Street, not far from the Green Street or Forest Hills T stations). We've got a semi-private room in the back. Get dinner, watch a slide show, drink up, and maybe listen to a bagpiper (we're working on it). We may even get Filling the Stage to run their crowd-pleasin' burlesque rendition of Fat-Bottom Girls, in honor of the fattest-bottomest girl of them all. Donations will be accepted for NOLOSE.
Please RSVP by Saturday morning to [email protected].
Yours in sadness,
Marina
P.S. By way of explaining who Heather was to me, I want to share with you all this this note, which I wrote recently to Heather's online support circle. She was amazing, and her work in radical sexiness and self-love will continue on because of how she influenced me and many, many others.
***************
Yesterday at 2:30 in the afternoon I was sitting in my living room frantically sewing velcro on a pair of homemade tear-away panties. We had a show in the evening, and I had about 2 hours left before I had a meeting with our tech director, so I really shouldn't have been working on my costume STILL, but there you have it. As I poked the needle into the fabric and my thumb at the same time, I grinned to myself and said, Heather would be laughing if she saw this. Also she'd probably have 4 suggestions for how to do it better. We were always doing last-minute DIY costuming for the Fat-Bottom Revue, but that only added to the adrenaline.
Remember when we met at the Big Moves day of dance? I think it was 2001. You had heard about us and said, hey, if the fatties can dance in SF, that's where Big Burlesque should be. And I had not only heard about you, but I had seen you at Burning Man (in 1999? Could it really be?) and thought, damn. Just that, but two syllables: DA-yum.
I was a big shy fattie butch, terrified about everything I thought I wanted in life slipping away, facing a swirling new life of sex and sexiness and femme-ness and make-up and skirts and my own cleavage and dance and Big Moves
taking off, and yes, tear-away panties. You held my hand and pushed me to take off more and showed me how to work the audience and applauded my first choreographic attempts. That fake spender routine was my first experience of collaborative choreography, and it was HARD, remember? But since then I have done several pieces with others, and now I have the toolbox of how to work with them, thanks to the honest, hardworking, careful-listening style that YOU modeled for me.
With you I find strength to dig into my desires, hold them up to the light, and put them on if they fit (and make them fit if they don't). I always try to be, you know, balls to the wall, but never was half so much so before I saw you doing it, with your fine fat ass and your furry or leopard-print EVERYTHING and that determined chin that can cut holes in glass and take someone's eye out if they're looking at you the wrong way. With you I feel at home with my hungers, to do more, go further, accomplish more, to make the fiercest choreography for my fattie dancers, to find the wildest costumes and best special effects. Because that's what you did for us.
Half the time when we talk about shows or productions or the tough stuff of organizational development, we don't even have to finish our sentences. You know exactly what I'm talking about. You are my only sister in fat dance, the only one of the same "generation" and same pattern of trying to organize what has barely begun. We weren't separated at birth, only when I moved to Boston in 2004, but I still sometimes feel the emptiness, the lack, the pang in my ribs where we tore away. Because you are my only sister in that place, my older sister. You taught me so much. And I can always feel you, in the movement and the hip rolls and the fiery drive and the crazy shows and yes, in the scraping of the hastily placed velcro against my skin.
I love you, Heather. I dance for you.
M
Boston-area fatties and their friends and loved ones are invited to a wake for Heather this coming Sunday, February 18, at 6 p.m. at Doyle's Cafe in Jamaica Plain (3484 Washington Street, not far from the Green Street or Forest Hills T stations). We've got a semi-private room in the back. Get dinner, watch a slide show, drink up, and maybe listen to a bagpiper (we're working on it). We may even get Filling the Stage to run their crowd-pleasin' burlesque rendition of Fat-Bottom Girls, in honor of the fattest-bottomest girl of them all. Donations will be accepted for NOLOSE.
Please RSVP by Saturday morning to [email protected].
Yours in sadness,
Marina
P.S. By way of explaining who Heather was to me, I want to share with you all this this note, which I wrote recently to Heather's online support circle. She was amazing, and her work in radical sexiness and self-love will continue on because of how she influenced me and many, many others.
***************
Yesterday at 2:30 in the afternoon I was sitting in my living room frantically sewing velcro on a pair of homemade tear-away panties. We had a show in the evening, and I had about 2 hours left before I had a meeting with our tech director, so I really shouldn't have been working on my costume STILL, but there you have it. As I poked the needle into the fabric and my thumb at the same time, I grinned to myself and said, Heather would be laughing if she saw this. Also she'd probably have 4 suggestions for how to do it better. We were always doing last-minute DIY costuming for the Fat-Bottom Revue, but that only added to the adrenaline.
Remember when we met at the Big Moves day of dance? I think it was 2001. You had heard about us and said, hey, if the fatties can dance in SF, that's where Big Burlesque should be. And I had not only heard about you, but I had seen you at Burning Man (in 1999? Could it really be?) and thought, damn. Just that, but two syllables: DA-yum.
I was a big shy fattie butch, terrified about everything I thought I wanted in life slipping away, facing a swirling new life of sex and sexiness and femme-ness and make-up and skirts and my own cleavage and dance and Big Moves
taking off, and yes, tear-away panties. You held my hand and pushed me to take off more and showed me how to work the audience and applauded my first choreographic attempts. That fake spender routine was my first experience of collaborative choreography, and it was HARD, remember? But since then I have done several pieces with others, and now I have the toolbox of how to work with them, thanks to the honest, hardworking, careful-listening style that YOU modeled for me.
With you I find strength to dig into my desires, hold them up to the light, and put them on if they fit (and make them fit if they don't). I always try to be, you know, balls to the wall, but never was half so much so before I saw you doing it, with your fine fat ass and your furry or leopard-print EVERYTHING and that determined chin that can cut holes in glass and take someone's eye out if they're looking at you the wrong way. With you I feel at home with my hungers, to do more, go further, accomplish more, to make the fiercest choreography for my fattie dancers, to find the wildest costumes and best special effects. Because that's what you did for us.
Half the time when we talk about shows or productions or the tough stuff of organizational development, we don't even have to finish our sentences. You know exactly what I'm talking about. You are my only sister in fat dance, the only one of the same "generation" and same pattern of trying to organize what has barely begun. We weren't separated at birth, only when I moved to Boston in 2004, but I still sometimes feel the emptiness, the lack, the pang in my ribs where we tore away. Because you are my only sister in that place, my older sister. You taught me so much. And I can always feel you, in the movement and the hip rolls and the fiery drive and the crazy shows and yes, in the scraping of the hastily placed velcro against my skin.
I love you, Heather. I dance for you.
M
