Popination Rotation
a series of unhinged personal essays disguised as pub reviews. Today: Full Cycle Café & Bar.
It’s a bike shop! It’s a bar! It’s a…bistro?
I first found Full Cycle through performing there with Blue Dime Cabaret, my variety show I co-produce and often perform in, way back when we first created the thing in 2018. Back then, it was mainly a bicycle shop and their café was sort of a minor addition. So us coming in with our racy clothing (not bike racy; racy-racy!) and our sparkly curtain and tasseled boobs was an unusual and wild thing! But it was a lot of fun, and that old location of theirs was right on the historic and walkable Pearl Street Mall, which meant even though we were new and not well known, we’d get curious foot traffic in to our shows.
They were our first venue for our very first show. The other first venue we performed in, overlapping with this, was in a church. Yep. That’s kind of a long story—well, not really—it was one of the larger venues for the Boulder International Fringe Festival, which we were lucky enough to get into that lottery way back then as fresh faces. That ended up not being worth the cash, but we stayed at Full Cycle for a while, even performing there once or twice in their new location, after they moved out of that no doubt cripplingly expensive corner spot on the Mall.
Venue? I hardly know you.
Whatever happened to my variety show living at the wonderful DV8 Distillery, you might ask? Well unfortunately, mere days before our August show in fact, we heard that DV8 had shuttered its doors suddenly and unceremoniously, without warning. Yipes. And so, we had to scramble for an emergency venue change. It took us around 48 hours to pin down our old friends at Full Cycle, and that makes me very, very proud. Also exhausted.
But Full cycle was in their new location (which we’d only seen a couple times before), and they had a robust live music scene going on already (and I think maybe comedy, too?) But their normal Fridays are a jazz supper club and it looks like a cool and hip and mellow kind of setup, which worked really well for our cabaret style vaudeville shenanigans. And this new location has lots of parking, which is a huge improvement over their old pricey Pearl Street Mall space (which still languishes empty, btw). And the night we needed an emergency venue, they had a cancellation, so yay us and yay them!
Chaos? Have you met us?
Oh, but there was such chaos even after the successful venue switch. Our stage kitten left all their notes behind, and so had to go to each performer in turn and ask what they needed as far as setup, again. Katya Peepin left her skirt behind and had to borrow a discarded one that my performance partner used in our opening act. A friend of ours got a flat tire and couldn’t come to the show at all, while another friend showed up, surprising us all. And of course when it’s a venue like this, there’s no real dressing room but a storage area in the back, where we dodge bike parts and try and keep the chain grease off our spangles.
My act opened the show, a duet with our emcee who is the other recovering academic in the group. We began in professorial garb and then took same off to the Van Halen hit ‘Hot For Teacher.’ I had a giant pencil which I brought out at the (in?)appropriate time, and it seemed a good raucous opener to the ‘80s themed show. Called ‘Girls Gays & Theys Just Wanna Have Fun,’ it boasted a ton of fabulous burlesque and drag, one of which was the eminent Blass Femme, lip syncing and exercising to the peppy patter of none other than the late great Richard Simmons. Which. I dunno—has anyone ever lip synced Richard Simmons before? In full leg-warmered, short-shorted, fanny-packed drag? It was phenomenal, as were we all. The audience was small (I blame the venue change), but very bouncy and loud and into it.
1980s nostalgia seems to be a thing, even among those who weren’t around during that time. I saw a musician who specializes in ‘80s-style electronica musing that it was a ‘simpler time.’ I’m not sure that’s true—though I was a kid, I don’t remember feeling all that simple back then. Maybe he felt that way because he knows we didn’t have literally the entire information of the whole world at our literal fingertips. Anyway. ‘80s music is great to dance to—we knew that then and we haven’t forgotten it today. So it was a nice thing, to have a little nostalgia and to return to an old friend in an old neighborhood (one that’s right across the street from the Kinky Boots location, and my childhood home, no less).
