Miss Honore Makes Her Entrance

Honoré Jerques stood backstage and smoked, leaning against the doorjamb to the loading dock behind the Extrav! stage in the only nine square feet of space where smoking was still allowed. Her high heel skewered the white tape that defined her prison, shredding it as her pointy toe swung left and right, left and right while she inhaled and glowered.

Vegas had been better when the Boys ran it, before all these corporations with their ticking computers and their per-square-foot-income-breakdowns and their policies had invaded. She took a deep drag, reducing the stick to a glowing nub, and enjoyed the feeling of the smoke roiling around through her lungs.

Secondhand smoke was not a danger around Honoré. Expelling clouds of smoke was lazy, she would have told you, and a waste besides. Why bother to light up, if you’re just going to spit it all out? With her smokes, as in everything else she did, Honoré was a professional.

She scowled at the backs of her dancers as they ran past. One group of covered girls hurried from an exit on stage left to an entrance on stage right. Some boys trooped down the stairs to the dressing rooms while the male singers hurried to change costumes. Honoré caught shreds of talk, the endless, nightly bitching about the pace, or the choreography, or the audience, or her. She glared at them and ground the white tape with her sharp heel and sucked in smoke.

Spoiled children. Every one.

She watched as a rustling herd of tall nude girls went by. She looked them over critically. Heddy: she drove Honoré crazy with that stupid accent, but she looked dynamite on stage. Nadja and Ellen: young still, might be good, might fizzle and never grow into themselves. Sharon: annoying, but a good dancer with a great body who never changed, never gained or lost an ounce, was utterly reliable. Linda: a bitch, steel-plated and unrepentant. That, Honoré didn’t mind, but Linda was also lazy, schlepping her way through every number with barely enough energy to get from one side of the stage to the other. She’d be gone next contract. She’d more than worn out her bitchy charm.

Rachel. Honoré Jerques looked at Rachel Ferguson through slitted eyes, watching her fishnet-wrapped ass retreat behind a curtain in the direction of the stairs. She’d noticed Rachel watching back recently when she looked her over. Noticing her boss’ notice, clearly. Rachel knew the contract was more than half over. She knew that she was at an age, now, when each new contract might be her last. Not that she sagged, yet. Not that she had crow’s feet, or her hips had spread, or anything obvious had changed at all. She was still a woman in her prime, to any other eyes. But a woman who had reached her prime, Miss Honoré Jerques knew, was a woman who had nowhere left to go but down.

Miss Honoré, herself, had retired from her days on stage long before she’d passed her prime. Before she’d even reached it, some said. In those days, you didn’t have a baby, then get to come back as if nothing had happened.

Although, officially, in Honoré’s case, nothing had. Her child had come and gone from her life quite efficiently. Only the father had wanted it at all, and by the time it arrived, he was long gone. So Honoré had retired, decently and quietly, and now she had no patience for girls who refused to go when their time came.

And no mercy, when those girls fought and argued at auditions. All Miss Honoré’s dancers had to attend auditions for each new contract, no matter how long or how hard they’d worked for her. Those were infamous scenes of tears, begging, thrown dance bags, screaming exits, and desperate dancer vitriol, all aimed at her. Just to think of it made her smile. Honoré hadn’t raised her voice in decades. She just told the truth, brutal and unwelcome as it might be. Dancers weren’t known for their intelligence, she’d said so more than once. And why should they be? She was here to be their brains. She was here to tell them all the things they didn’t want to hear. Someone had to do it, and Miss Honoré was gifted.

Rachel. Was Rachel’s time up? Honoré’s cigarette might have whimpered, she sucked in its lifesmoke so aggressively as she considered. It glowed hopelessly and succumbed to her, and got just a little revenge when she sucked down the last of it and burned her fingers.

“Shit,” Miss Honoré exclaimed, expelling more smoke than usual. She dashed the stub down and ground it into the hoary floorboards with the toe of her pump, shredding it to its molecules and taking out a good chunk of the white tape with it. Then she idly tapped her fingers against each other while she watched another swarm of cast members go by. The Space number was halfway through now, and there was no reason why she had to stick around in this godforsaken taped-in prison.

Miss Honoré stomped after her dancers. Time to rattle a few cages and wake the babies from their stupor, she thought. The corners of her lipsticked mouth lifted, as if the thick red sheathing were expressing a pleasure of its own.

But a second later, Miss Honoré took control again. She straightened her mouth, licked the lips just to remind them who was boss, and stalked off through the basements and hallways toward her office, where a full pack and her nearly-useless assistant, Gina, waited in fear and trembling. Her fingers twitched, eager to asphyxiate her next cigarette. She could already feel the throbbing power of her Zippo in her palm.

Testy Lesbiana looked over her shoulder. “The Dragon Lady’s on the warpath tonight.”

“What the hell else is new?” Sharon demanded. She dropped her wig on the floor and bumped
Nadja as she bent over to grab her new shoes. “Watch it!”

Rachel’s line of nudes was in the middle of a their quickest change of the show. Moments earlier, they had captured and enslaved all the boy dancers, who were costumed fetchingly as disco spacemen. The spacemen were now busy being mesmerized by the Space Queen and her coterie of demur ladies in waiting (the chorus singers and covered dancers) while the topless girls stripped ten feet off-stage and dressed for their next dance. In less than a minute, they’d be onstage again to seduce the boys and thus propagate the Space Cowgirl species. The number ended in a cataclysm, as usual, when the spacemen turned on their captors and broke free, and the entire Space Cowgirl world, in the form of a three-level disco set complete with waterfalls and two story slides spewing a nude a second, collapsed. “Now, now, ladies,” Testy soothed them. “Hey, Rachel, here’s a question. You ever think about the future?”

Rachel was busily peeling off her silver lame opera gloves, exchanging them for identical pink ones. Her silver Afro, chrome pillbox and thigh-high boots went next, all replaced by pink versions with glittery jewels.

“What?” she asked Testy, tugging at her boots and getting one finger of her left glove caught in its zipper. “Damn. What, Testy?”

“Yrga who-ah kentter stu,” Heddy said.

“Yeah, right,” Rachel nodded. “Test?”

Testy Lesbiana reached under Heddy’s chin and did something with her hat strap. “There it is, honey,” she said reassuringly. “Just like you asked me to do last night.”

“Urffda.”

Heddy turned and led the way back toward the stage. “What are you talking about?” Rachel demanded as she followed Heddy and bumped into Linda.

“Watch it.”

“Sorry.”

Testy hovered near the girls as they formed up, waiting to step out one-by-one and join their partners for the big propagation adagio. She brushed, dusted, tugged, and double-checked that everything was connected, secured, covered or exposed as necessary.

“Just wondering, sweetie-pie,” she hummed.

“Well, what the hell does that mean?” The first boy in line was just rounding the corner and reaching a hand to lead Heddy out. The rest of the girls all took one step forward. “And what are you doing asking something like that in the middle of a number, Test?” Sharon left, and they stepped forward again.

Testy Lesbiana shrugged. “Too chicken to ask when you’ve got time to really answer, probably. Oh, honey, wait a sec–” she reached up to pop a loose jewel off Rachel’s spangled epaulet. “Gotcha! Bring that costume to me when you’re finished, I’ll sew it back on.”

“Of course. But are you saying–”

“Rachel!” Nadja hissed from behind her, and Rachel realized her cue had come. Her partner, Ralph, was pausing, sticking his hand so far past the edge of the curtain that he could have picked her nose if he’d wanted. He’d probably slap her if she didn’t grab it.

“Aren’t there better things you’d like to do?” Testy asked, “besides just parade your exquisite tits all up and down this stage till they kick you out?”

“You think my tits are exquisite?” Rachel asked. She made her entrance, allowing Ralph to lead her downstage center for the pas de deux.

She heard a heavy sigh from behind her. “Showgirls,” Testy Lesbiana exclaimed.

NEXT POST: Vegas' Own Guardian Angel (Monday 7/27)