Bash Compactor: Big Girls Don’t Crisis

Did I really need to go to the opening night of a party called Crisis? If I really wanted a crisis, I could’ve just stayed home and looked in the mirror. My rent was late, my apartment was a mess, I was late for a deadline and I didn’t have enough money for a facelift. If that’s not a crisis, I don’t know what is.

“Hey, how are you? You look great!” host Daniel Nardicio told me, his arms linked around the waists of two guys, their buttocks exposed. Well, maybe I didn’t need the facelift just yet.

One of the derrieres belonged to Nardicio’s cutie go-go boyfriend Go-Go Harder Faster Stronger, who jumped onto the bar to dance just after saying hello. Nightlife personalities like Michael T, former Vandam door bitch Cynthia Powell, Paul Short, Chris Ryan and DJ Rich King are the hosts at this new weekly party, housed at Elevate, a rather skanky two-level bar at Eighth Avenue and West 29th Street. I’d been hearing a lot about the venue, under new ownership by Ricky Mercado (formerly of Speed, Boysroom and HK), and I saw lots of familiar faces, including party promoters Adrian De Berardinis, Diva Steve, Herra*C, Darren Kinoshita and Cory Koons.

Acid Betty, dressed as a man, was somewhere in the mixed crowd of gay boys, drag queens and women, but without the makeup I didn’t know what to look for. Those glitter queens The Pixie Harlots were performing that night and the statuesque Machine Dazzle arrived wearing a 4-foot-tall headdress made of black and white forks.

“I just got back from Berlin,” I told a group of friends standing by the door. They seemed a bit jealous. They wanted to strut their stuff in Europe, too, but I’d beaten them to the punch. “What did you do there?” someone asked me, skeptical. “I performed at Chantal’s House of Shame and at an art salon in Neukölln,” I told them. That was an experience, running around the streets of Berlin, confusing everyone as Miss Juicy Geraldine, clad in a tacky housedress, white orthopedic shoes, rolled-down stockings, gray hair twirled around sponge rollers. “She’s an 85-year-old deep-throat vomit slut who adores Lawrence Welk and knitting, but also advocates sex parties for senior citizens, free dildos from Medicaid and better fisting DVDs in the nursing home library.” Those boys all looked at me and finally understood. Crisis averted.