Mary Crawley, James Wiley, Arthur Chenin, Kay Conley-Rawson and Marin Tauch get steamy.
A
visit to Virginia City on a Saturday in September thrusts you into an elaborately costumed event of fantastical visual proportions— even for the notoriously quirky Wild West town of Virginia City. A parade is just wrapping-up, which isn’t unusual for the streets on a weekend. But this was no ordinary Virginia City historic parade with mufflers and donkeys.
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Look to the left. Participants wander the streets in Victorian garb. Look to the right, a giant mechanical land-based submarine fish—the Nautilus—has just finished wheeling down the main street, firing water from its harpoon water cannon while blasting techno beats, intermixed with the occasional sounds of a working submarine—the ping of a radar, the ring of a diving alarm. And the Victorian garb of the parade participants typical to the history-rich town has been seemingly sucked through a time machine. Those mufflers have been transformed to rayguns. Futuristic embellishments like aviation goggles and clockwork gears, melded with imaginative inspirations like metallic fairy wings and light-up gadgets, have been fashioned to classic 19th century garments to which various alterations have been made. Modest, floor-grazing skirts typical of the time period have been replaced by short, crimson versions overlaying black fishnet stockings. Bird-beaked masks constructed from leather, reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange, cover select faces, adding to the dream-like scenario. Suddenly, amid the applause of the parade’s crowd, you hear the shouts of a protest. As a league of belly dancers shake their way down the street, matching the sway of their exposed hips to the beat of accompanying Middle Eastern drums, a group of Victorian “purists” shield their eyes and yell out in response to the seemingly risqué dancers, “Close your children’s eyes! Don’t let your husbands look!” You rub your eyes and blink hard. How many of those Bloody Marys did you down at the Bucket of Blood—and were they dosed? Intrigued, you find
L L A
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UP Steampunk, a combination of style, history and escapism, comes to a boil in Northern Nevada
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YuleSteam will be at the 1864 Tavern on 290 California Ave., at 7 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 13. OPINION
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NEWS
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GREEN
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FEATURE STORY
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ARTS&CULTURE
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ART OF THE STATE
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FOODFINDS
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FILM
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MUSICBEAT
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NIGHTCLUBS/CASINOS
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THIS WEEK
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MISCELLANY
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NOVEMBER 14, 2013
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RN&R
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