Sultry

Waaaaay back when your not-so-humble narrator was a young buck, I was helping a community theater celebrate their 25th anniversary.  We were singing all the show tunes they had performed over the years with the different musicals from Fiddler on the Roof, Oklahoma, South Pacific, yada yada yada.  One of the songs was "Whatever Lola Wants" from Damn Yankess, and it was performed by a woman who had been with that theater for some time.

If you've ever done a show at a community theater, you'll know the type.  Not old but not young, maybe in her thirties, has a family and kids, grew up acting and thinking she was going to be in Hollywood when she graduated but never quite got there.  Not "pretty" enough to be in film, but more than pretty enough to be on stage.  And she had talent.

I can't remember her name, but she would always come in dressed up in Midwest mother frumpy clothing. You could tell she had a figure, but she never put it on display.

And then the performance came.  The guys did "Nothing like a Dame" from South Pacific.  I did a duet with another woman, "Anything you can do" from Annie Get Your Gun, and then this woman walked on after us and transformed herself into a different creature.  From the opening notes, she stopped walking, and damn near slithered up to the microphone, as if every joint in her body had just been given about two or three new directions they could bend.  She didn't take the microphone, she just touched it with her fingers and leaned into it, with this come-hither smile on her face that made every guy in the place damn near jump out of their suits.  Instead of tapping her toes or bobbing her head to the rhythm, she moved her hip.  Just one.  The other hip stayed firmly in place, which did all kinds of interesting things to her body.  And when she sang the opening lines....  "Whatever Lola wants.....  Lola gets....." every red-blooded man in that building would have begged her to want them, get them.  It was like she wasn't forcing the notes out of her mouth, they just kind of fell out onto the microphone, pushed out by the sheer volume of sexiness that was contained in this one woman's body.  It was a voice that promised every kind of pleasure under the sun, and even more under the moon, where you can shed the inhibitions that you normally hold on to.

This frumpy Midwest mom went from "Meh" to Aphrodite in about five seconds, and had every guy in the place eating from the palm of her hand, from the moment she first sang until she walked off stage, and probably well after that.  And she did it dressed in a black skirt and a blouse that wasn't opened any further than the top of her cleavage.  I think that might have been what convinced me that sex appeal has nothing to do with boobs or butts or revealing clothing.  That woman, for three minutes, was the sexiest woman on the face of the earth, period, full stop, end of story.  And it came from inside, not from her flashing skin.

The only close approximation I've been able to find for this woman is Sarah Vaughn.  But even Sarah Vaughn can't match the sheer amount of pure sex appeal that this woman put into the song.  Still....  don't watch the video, just close your eyes and listen to the song.



By the by, I was reminded of that woman at the theater because someone gave me a Sarah Vaughn CD, and when I heard the opening notes to "Lola Wants" come out of my little boombox at the shop I flashed back to her performance.  Memory is a funny thing sometimes.