starting from the ground up.

it's important to have a good foundation...

ShoFolk Sandal

ShoFolk Skimmer

ShoFolk Saddle Shoe

Bloch Ballet Flat

Bloch Ballet Sneaker

Pour La Victoire Arianna Wedge

Pour La Victoire Dalmais Sandal

Pour La Victoire Wedge

bootycall!

mike delamont has added a second sexual innuendo show to his friday night docket!


(another) one night stand with mike delamont! get sloppy seconds just-as-good-the-second-time-around at 10PM. tickets on sale here at rebel rebel, and possibly by mike, street-side after dark.

a one night stand you won't regret.

       Vanessa and I asked Mike to stick around becuase he was very tall. Granted, this made him only slightly more threatening than the two of us.

       “Sure,” Mike answered benignly, tenting his eyebrows. He glanced over his shoulder at the couple banging out of the store. We had just been sassed by a crusty meth addict, who upon exiting had promised us a return visit that included a gun. Mike had come to check how ticket sales were going for his upcoming solo show, A One Night Stand with Mike Delamont.

       Later that week, when he met for this interview, he was less forward than I expected. Docile, even. He loped over to the table I sat at and introduced himself quietly, twisting a bottle of Boylan’s soda in his hands. He seemed nervous. He has a sway in the bottom of his back, and when he stands his hips push forwards. It was like he was leaning away.

       Mike has lived in Victoria for twelve years now. After he graduated high school, he continued the classical voice lessons he had begun as a kid in Victoria.

       “A company moved into Cranbrook when I was little and I just started taking singing lessons. I grew up on Disney musicals,” he said, gazing fixedly at the ceiling.

       Maybe it was the subliminal messages allegedly hidden in Disney shows that gave Mike his off color sense of humor. At the end of our interview he told me that if I ever dated a redhead to be aware that they are not as hairless as they may look. Then he smacked his lips together and mimed pulling strings of pubes from between his teeth.

 Instead, Mike credits the birth of his humor to being six-foot-one in the eighth grade and the jack-ass Valedictorian who picked on him relentlessly.

“If I ever win an award I’ll flip [that guy] off on TV.”

       He laughed and shook his head. “I preformed in an open house in grade 10, and this guy in my gym class thought I was hysterical,” he said. “I started to get introduced as ‘the funny guy’.”

       Being the funny guy has paid off for Mike. He quit his voice training (“The backstabbing stuff was bizarre”) and began to perform in small theatre ventures around Victoria. In 2004, he and his producing partner were noticed by Gina, then-host of Atomic Vaudeville [AV].

       “It’s nice to be a part of such a cult following,” Mike said of working with AV. “When I started out I knew about half the audience, but now I’ll maybe know ten people who will see the whole run.”

       An enormous portion of Mike’s stand-up is improvised during the shows. He chooses a character and rolls with their personality, hoping that the audience’s response will perpetuate his preformance.

       “It’s hilarious how different people interpret the characters,” Mike shrugged and went to take a sip from his pop. He had finished it about ten minutes before, but kept forgetting and putting it back up to his lips. He frowned at the mouth of the bottle before continuing.

       “Like God for instance. I’ve never specified exactly what or who God is. So I get people coming up to me and saying ‘I think it’s so cool that God is a woman/transsexual/cross-dresser/grandmother.’ They complete the picture for themselves.”

       Mike’s God is a surly Scottish woman with a penchant for shoulder pads and florals, and a low opinion of Florida.

       “Originally, God was supposed to be a British man in a dress. But he just wasn’t funny. I remember going home and thinking it was too bad, because it was such a good idea for a character. But then, I got a better wig.” He glanced up and grinned. “I found this short, black bob thing and changed the voice to this lilty Scottish accent, and it suddenly got much funnier.”

       Jimmy Peek-a-Boo and Carlo Rossi, Mike’s two other most popular characters are composites of offensive people that he’s encountered in his life.

       “I was at this conference in Vancouver, and one host was this really loud and uh, gregarious lesbian. Whenever she ran out of material she’d talk about how she and fiancée met. It was loud, and kind of offensive, and wasn’t really funny. She kept yelling at the audience to shut-up, and I thought Well. I could do that.”

       Jimmy was completed by another presenter who’d laughter created a Pavlovian effect on his audience.

       “He just had this crazy-sounding infectious laugh, and whenever he laughed his audience couldn’t help but laugh because he sounded so ridiculous.”

       Jimmy came together with the purchase of pink Hawaiian shirts and a curly mullet wig worn backwards to become a rag-tag pompadour.

“With Jimmy [and Carlo, Italian box-wine maker], I never write one word of dialogue beforehand,” Mike said. “The people who are heckling at my shows just want to be a part of it. They get a good zing, the audience laughs, and they settle. Sometimes it all gets moving so fast it becomes hard to hear something in real life and not make a joke out of it.”

Carlo Rossi was conceived of a co-worker’s Thanksgiving hangover.

“Apparently the combination of the really terrible box wine and turkey made for the worst hangover in history. As soon as I had my idea for [Carlo] I knew where I had to go.”

Things are moving fast for Mike. Late 2010, he’ll be moving to Toronto to test his characters against a bigger, stranger city.

“Sometimes I wonder if I should just move to Vancouver,” Mike said. He has contacts and friends there, people he has worked in shows with.

“But…I’ve worked for six years here to try and build up something credible. I figure if I’m going to be a nobody, I should be a nobody in the biggest city instead of starting from scratch twice.”

       When I asked Mike what would be the hardest thing about moving to Toronto, I expected him to say loneliness. Victoria is already notorious for its two degrees of separation, but the gaps are even smaller in the small theatre community.

       “Well. I’m a terrible schmoozer. I come off as a super diva because I sit in the corner with my club-soda post-show and try to think of things to say. On-stage I have that ultra confidence, but off-stage is different.”

       He doesn’t say it outright, but this is an assumption that Mike clearly dislikes, or at least has trouble comprehending. A woman who has professed to be his biggest fan encouraged him to sell life-sized posters of himself at the AV shows, but Mike would not consider the idea.

       “What? I’d order like two hundred posters of myself and try to sell them? No one would buy them! And then I’d be stuck with a ton of posters of myself. God. Who would want that?”

       “You could paper your Toronto apartment with them,” I suggested. Mike laughed and flicked his hair out of his eyes.

       “Then everyone who came over would point at the walls and say ‘Ohmygod. I knew it. Divaaa!’”

       After our interview was officially over, Mike and I stood on a street corner and chatted for about an hour. He asked me about eight times if I was cold. He gave me sage dating advice (see above) and we discussed the lack of W4W missed connections on craigslist. At some point, I told him about my gay friend’s “inside dick” (AKA butch mojo), and he began to riff about his “spiritual vagina”. I had expected to do things much more on his terms. For him to have much less time for this interview, especially considering his recent media push in Monday magazine and the Times Colonist.

       “I’m always happy to talk to somebody who likes something I did.” Mike said decisively. “I figure that if I can’t give them five minutes of my time then there’s no reason they should give me ninety minutes of theirs.”

       Are you interested in a One Night Stand you won’t regret or have to be drunk to carry through with? Mike offers his One Night Stand at a discounted rate of $15 for students, or $18 standard price. Pre-sale tickets have SOLD OUT (congrats, Mike!) but there will be a limited number available at the door. The laughs will be belly-aching-painful, the Phillip’s Chocolate Porter will be flowing, and you won’t wake up feeling ashamed/slutty the next day.

sly little fox.

            “Look how long my hair is getting.”

            Sylvia grasped the tips of her hair in small fists and extended her arms on either side of her head, pushing out her bottom lip. Her hair falls to her waist, but the layer doesn’t look heavy, as it can appear on others. She is small, and seems delicate in the way that her toes point inwards when she stands, all her weight on one hip.

            “Sly was just a name for the computer system [at Rebel Rebel],” she said, rolling her eyes. “They asked me what I wanted, and Sly is close to Sylvia, I guess.”

            But Sylvia is sly. She’s been creating fur jewelry for six years, though before and in between that time she completed a BA in English at the University of Victoria. Widely and eccentrically read, Sylvia can spit cultural criticism more effectively and convincingly than she can sell you a pair of jeans (but don't be fooled- she sells denim with aplomb). Jewelry isn’t paying all the bills, so Sylvia developed a taste for cigars and taught others to appreciate night-smoking at the old cigar shop. She led tours at the museum, and of course, took it upon herself to teach those who frequent Rebel Rebel and B&G a thing or two about personal style: cream-colored oxford shoes, long in the toe, and octagonal glasses from the sixties. Patent leather over-the-knee boots with a pair of lambskin leggings.

            The constant in her answers is a sense of incredulity, as though she is unsure why someone would ask her about something like her earrings, which she originally intended to be only for herself.

“I made something for me and I suppose it just sort of caught on,” she said.

 Sylvia tilted her head to the side, nose wrinkled. So many of her movements are reminiscent of a small animal–a rabbit or a fox. Quick and sweet and more precarious than they could ever look. The piece she is referring to was a pair of earrings: rectangles of coarse deer hair with strips of petal-soft black rabbit fur lain on top.

“Fur is so tactile. I liked the idea of wearing something you could play with. I’m not the first to do that, either. Taxidermy and skulls. Georgia O’Keefe.” She nods decisively and wraps her hair around her fingers, dragging her hands down the length. She doesn’t wear much jewelry anymore. A few large rings and a thin-banded watch. Later, I pet a small rabbit-fur barrette of her design. Clipped up in a bun, it will barely peek from twists of hair. Sylvia uses mostly deer and black or white rabbit fur, sometimes adding pyrite stones or charms. The best part about her jewelry is it’s unassuming nature. The seeming shyness that makes it worth seeking.

“It’s interesting to be able to elevate the skin of a creature to something other than a rug,” she glances up briefly. “It’s sort of like, letting that feature of the animal live out past its fullest potential.”

Caught up in loose hair or the folds of a dress, the earrings and necklaces and brooches slip in and out of view. Their camouflage shifts with a tilt of the wearer’s head, with the way they angle their shoulders.  The jewelry is playful as peek-a-boo, as sly as Sylvia herself.