creating a/broad, October 5, 2013

Sex-Buzz Saturday Nights
by Cameryn Moore
@camerynmoore

On tour, every night is Saturday night, even if it’s actually Tuesday night in Tulsa. I’ve got a show, I’m meeting new people, I’m bouncing around afterward cajoling whoever I can into coming out for post-show pancakes with me. I make jokes about it, about how solo shows will have the loneliest cast parties if we don’t invite people to share, but it’s true. I just got done with a show, and I want someone to celebrate with. 

If I’m lucky, if people have felt moved and included enough in the show, they’ll agree and then while I’m striking the set and politely deflecting offers of help—thank you, it would take more time to explain my packing-up process than to just do it myself—they bicker about what late-night joint has the best bar food and the least ambient noise and (I make a point to mention it to them to include in their search parameters) the most fattie-friendly seating. 

Yes, we are that noisy table

And then we go there in a caravan, a cavalcade of awesome, sex-buzz energy, to whatever pizza shop or barbecue joint or pancake house or late-night diner or Chinese restaurant they decided. It is inevitably the right choice, yes, we agree noisily, and with much laughter and jostling we settle ourselves noisily down. 

Yes, we are that noisy table, that rowdy but very well-tipping bunch, that makes the table of men in cowboy hats and their tired-looking wives give us the collective side-eye. We are talking and sharing appetizers and asking questions and flirting, friending each other on Facebook, friending each other in real life. It’s the perfect cast party, with a new cast in every city. Yes, it is a Saturday night, no matter what the calendar pages say.

If I don’t have a show, doesn’t matter: it’s still Saturday night, or maybe Friday, because I am looking for things to do, open mics to crash, gigs to gig, sidewalks that desperately need smut on them. I am looking, in fact, for other places where it is always Saturday night, where people go because they too don’t have a regular 9-to-5, or if they do, they are ignoring it for that one night because they are with a lover and they want to prolong the time they have together, even if it means a little bleariness at the office tomorrow morning. Or they are on vacation anyway, and they, too, are asking: what do people do for fun around here? I want to be part of the answer to that question.

I get to spread the weekend-all-week love around a little bit

So I ask my local contacts: What’s good, what’s happening, where do the fun people go? Often they get this surprised look on their face. They’re not used to the weekend happening all week long, they’ve never gone out on a Wednesday before, they don’t even know. Or they don’t get out of their neighbourhood much, and so they have to rack their brains a little to figure out where would be some likely sidewalk smut locations. So they text their friends, or someone at the next table in the café—who obviously can’t help eavesdropping because my voice is That Fucking Loud—leans over and offers a suggestion. Just by asking these questions, I get to spread the weekend-all-week love around a little bit.

Not only is every night on tour a Saturday night, but it is spring or summer just about everywhere I go, too. In late April or May, the weather is starting to heat up; even in Ontario the snow has mostly melted. By June Montreal has firmly settled into summer mode, which means lots of skin-baring fashions, which is great, because that’s pretty much all I take with me while on tour and jeezus Christ, we all look so fucking HOT. Even Edinburgh in August is pretty fucking spectacular.

Everywhere I go during my main touring season—mid-April to mid-November—it is always nice. I know that’s primarily a function of my tour route, dropping down through the states after whatever main summer tour I have lined up and winding up near the Gulf of Mexico in the fall. I will be in temperate, if not to say actually suffocatingly warm or hot weather, until mid-November. But even if that’s not something I’m doing deliberately—which hello, I don’t really even like hot weather!—it still feels more than coincidental, and it definitely feels highly symbolic.

Because summers are when the best weekends are, obviously. Summers are when people do act a fool and stay out late when they really “shouldn’t”, and they’re the perfect time to try new and boozier drinks or really just finally try that dessert and make orgasmo noises while you do it and have flings with people and sit on the grass anywhere without checking too closely and go see shows like mine because WOO-HOO WHY NOT IT’S SUMMER LET’S GO SEE SOMETHING LIKE PHONE WHORE. 

I get to have this feeling all the damn time, which is great, right? Because touring can be really, really shitty sometimes, but thank god there all those other times, when I’m wearing something really cleavage-y and I don’t need to worry that it’s inappropriate, because every night is Saturday, remember? And I’m talking with people about sex or some awesome bar that I should go check out, and the air is almost too warm against my skin, and in 40 minutes WOO HOO IT’S SUMMER IT’S ALWAYS SUMMER AND I GET TO PERFORM SOMETHING LIKE PHONE WHORE.

camerynmoore.com