It was a funny kind of crowd for a Wednesday night. It was a wild crowd at The Sound Factory, a fun crowd. Among them: roller derby girls minus their skates, some middle-aged dudes who might have been in some lounge band, drunk college kids and a clutch of heavily tattooed, pierced and gauged girlfriends out for a night among the meat-heads.
A few hipsters in hats and glasses hunkered off to the side while a party of middle class types held the tables up close to the stage. Everybody was here for the same thing: to catch The Pretty Things Peep Show, a vaudeville, sideshow, burlesque mash up with a fire eater and sword swallower, a sideshow geek willing to pound a six inch nail into his noggin, a burlesque dancer with smouldering bedroom eyes and crimson hair, a one-man rockabilly band and a half-pint sized dancer named “Lil Miss Firefly.”
It’s hard to call the show odd for Charleston. More like it’s just terribly rare. People want this kind of entertainment. We just don’t get it that often, which is a shame. This town is hungry for novelty.
The crowd loved the whole thing. They adored it. They ate it up, from the artful showing of skin and the girl who could breathe fire to the stomach churning moment when the show talker Eddie Vomit removed the drill from his nose, pondered what was on the end of it then licked it off.
Do not try this at home.
The night began with some local stuff: The Poor Folks Cabaret, a duo who mixed belly dancing with some slight of hand, and Pepper and Penny, local musicians and figure models for Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School, who came to do some burlesque dancing.
They did pretty well, though a slight wardrobe malfunction may have given the audience a little more than what anyone intended, and it was good to see some local talent branching out beyond the typical acts usually seen around Charleston, but the evening belonged to Eddie Vomit and his pals, who brought the boardwalk of Coney Island to the little bar on Kanawha Boulevard.
Sometimes they titillated. That’s where dancer and pin-up model Go Go Amy came in. 
Burlesque still gets confused with stripping and the two are kind of cousins, but while stripping is often mostly about raw lust and showing skin, burlesque dancing is more about the playful part of sex and anticipation. Go Go Amy scarcely revealed more than what you’d see on a public beach, but it was how she showed what she did.
Others times, Pretty Things Peep Show wowed. Eddie Price’s one-man band had a certain wow factor. Thrashing his way through one psychotic primitive rock tune after another, wailing, screaming and yodeling, he was a one man punk army. He played loud. He played hard and he did not let up.
Did his songs sound kind of the same? Yeah. Did it matter? No.
Heather Holiday was also pretty fascinating to watch. Where Go Go Amy played up a smokey sexuality, Holiday went for a more cartoon variety which worked well for someone sticking swords down her throat and breathing fire.
Finally, you have to mention Lil Miss Firefly, the freak attraction (she headlined an attraction called “FREAKS” in Las Vegas). Standing at somewhere in the neighborhood of two feet tall, she moved, gyrated and disrobed to the warbling of Eddie Price and his ukelele. 
That was kind of weird. A semi-naked, tattooed midget is not something you see every day. At least, not in Charleston, and maybe that’s a shame. Maybe what Charleston really needs is to have more semi-naked tattooed midgets. Maybe it would attract more business and industry to the area.
Nothing else seems to work. I think we should be willing to give it a try.
Anyway, Pretty Things Peep Show was a cool time. Next time they’re around, go check them out.
