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Fringe: RUB

A Gentlemen's Club revue as performed by trained dancers.

It was a darned shame RUB had to be moved from South Broad Street's recently defunct Dolphin Tavern – where (full disclosure) I lasted two nights as a go-go dancer in 1969 before telling my agent not to send me there again – too skuzzy even then. But with only two days to load in, Gunnar Montana (Gunnar Clark in his real-life JUNK persona) did his darnedest to funk-up the Latvian Club's side-room. Black spray-painted street detritus made for an interesting anti-Zagarian wall mosaic, but the narrow room's low ceiling cramped the audience. The scaffolding and apparatus -- a six-foot tall furry penis on four stabilizing metal stands, a gurney, and a pink heart for aerial work were too big for the tiny space. I'm sure all this cramped the dancers' style, though they gamely made the best of it.

Montana and his RUB collaborator Jasmine Zieroff also choreograph for the gentlemen's club Delilah's -- where (full disclosure) I was a judge three years' running for the National Exotic Dancer of the Year Contest. They conceived of their four dancers as "post-apocalyptic android sex bots."

In partial dis-clothesure, the brave beauties, Fatima Kargbo, Courtney Lapresi, Maureen Mo Lynch, and Ann Marie Gover were forced to dance so close to the audience, that by the end of the show we could see the Day-Glo paint that passed for pasties was cracking up. And often so nearly did they. Was Gover tangoing or tangling with the penis as it rebounded dangerously in her face? All four poured baby oil over each other and took to writhing on the floor in the oleaginous ending. I had a front row seat and was just glad they hadn't chosen a jello-fight. They took a bruising just trying to walk off.

So did this show further the cause of feminism? Did it make you think of gender? Hell no, that's why they call it the Fringe.

RUB, Gunnar Montana and Jazmin Zieroff. Latvian Society, 531 N. Seventh St. Sept. 13, 14, 15, 20, 21 at midnight, September 16, 20 at 10pm,  http://livearts-fringe.ticketleap.com/rub/#view=calendar