Out on the Limbs: Getting Freaky with Amber Martin
Posted at 4:51 PM Aug 05, 2008
On Tuesdays, Charlie Vazquez writes Gotham After Dark, a peek into what goes on in Manhattan's queer nightlife, with club and event reports and profiles of fascinating New Yorkers.
Last winter my boyfriend and I went to see Amber Martin perform at the now-deceased Rapture Café and were quickly embroiled in the comic dementia and brazen sexuality of her dozens of freaky characters. After making us laugh non-stop for nearly two hours, the pretty, curly-haired Ms. Martin ran out of the café wearing nothing but cowboy boots, tape on her nips and a fuzzy “thing” covering her womanhood. Everyone looked at each other thinking the same thing—did she really just run out onto Avenue A nearly naked?
Ms. Martin (a self-declared “Scorpio girl-child”) claims that her performance history began when she learned how to orgasm as a little girl, in the bathtub, by letting water fall from the faucet onto her clit. But a move many years later to Portland, Oregon (from her native Texas) served as the launch-pad that inspired her to create a pantheon of wacky alter-egos that are impossible to forget. As a means to showcase her magnificent voice, she began inventing these characters to cover music from her massive vinyl collection. After dabbling in multimedia with friends, she helped to found House of Cunt Performance Group in Portland, who performed two-hour shows with no intermission—instantly becoming the performance pariahs of the Portland underground.
A move to New York has thrown her into a larger and more complex performance landscape—but this girl, in addition to having performed with Justin Bond and Lady Rizo, is also a Drammy Award-winner and DJ (you can catch her after 8PM, every Monday at Lucky Strike, Grand St, Soho). With a busy month ahead, there are a few opportunities to catch Amber in dirty action. Her characters come to life at the next Queer Fetish, on Sunday, August 24th (www.queerfetishnyc.com) and you can also see her read filth at Mr. Black on August 8th. She also DJs at Mattachine—a clandestine, well-attended queer night of music held at the legendary Julius bar in the West Village—if you’re lucky to hear about it.
Charlie Vazquez is a Brooklyn-based writer, part-time fetish clown and the assistant to Diamanda Galás--but really, he's nice.
more: Gotham After Dark
