A few years back, I had a housemate, Steph, who was deeply into the goth scene. We drove up from Bloomington, IN to Chicago to go to a goth/industrial club night called Hell. Hell was run by a couple of Boston-based DJs (Lady Bathory and Cusraque) and featured some floor shows in between music sets.
One of the floor shows was a dance piece entitled "The Emasculation of Pan". In it, a buff young male dancer sporting a goat mask and a papier-mâché strap-on was seduced, disemboweled, and castrated by a shapely female dancer ("The Spider Queen") who emerged from a cocoon.
The dance piece was partly notable because the bit where Pan got killed involved apparently-real animal entrails (which I fervently hope they got at a butcher shop rather than from some DIY source).
I didn't see much of what they did with the animal intestines, because by then I was trying hard to not look at the stage.
Why?
Because the female dancer's costume consisted entirely of a coating of mottled gray liquid latex. About thirty seconds after she appeared on stage, she did a dance move in which she spread her legs and bent over.
And her latex ripped, right in the place you'd expect it to rip.
The $64,000 question is, of course, why she'd chosen to slather herself in latex in lieu of wearing a g-string. Maybe the burn of the latex on her pink bits felt good to her. Maybe she'd been wearing her Bad Idea Jeans all day. Maybe she'd flunked basic physics.
I have no answers.
All I have is the vivid, unforgettable image of the most intimate details of that girl's ass abruptly revealed beneath the bright lights of the stage.
That was when I decided that my boot laces were really, really interesting. The next time I dared take a peek at the stage, she was winding a loop of animal guts around the guy's neck.
And so I went back to scrutinizing my laces.
Later that night, when we were getting drinks and munchies in the back buffet room, we ran into the female dancer, who was now wearing a pair of black shorts to cover her costume failure. She looked moderately embarrassed, but seemed to be trying to be a trouper about things.
"Normally I wear more clothing than this," she laughed nervously.
Flash forward to two months later. Steph and I and our friend Drea were back in Chicago. We went to a downtown shoe store called 99th Floor, which carries all manner of punk/goth/industrial/rave stuff.
Steph found a pair of thigh-high leather boots she wanted to try on. She got them on over her jeans okay, but getting them off again was a problem. So I tried to help, tugging on the boots in a way that was most amusing to onlookers.
Drea said, "Jeez, Steph, why don't you just dip your legs in liquid leather."
The shopkeeper misheard her and thought she'd said "liquid latex".
"Oh, don't mess with that stuff!" he exclaimed. "My dancer friend used it on herself 'down there' for a show a couple months back, and she got a raging yeast infection! I hadda drive her to the women's clinic!"
Apparently, embarassing oneself in front of a packed crowd of clubgoers is not the only side effect of believing that liquid latex is a suitable and adequate coverage for one's nether regions.
So (as Paul Harvey might say) now you know the rest of the story