Valerie Sassafras - Banks Street Bar and Grill, New Orleans OR - October 25, 2014

[New Orleans] A middle aged lady with a short spiky haircut in skinny pink corduroy jeans on a keyboard, wailing new wave style. She was kind of art pop – something about girls going out at night… I don’t know. Her sincerity made it all the more bizarre. And then two average-joe guys jumped on stage and started dancing behind her – my shock at her transferred to shock at their asshole frat behavior. But then she dirty-danced them and completely incorporated them into her show, and I stopped being sure that it wasn’t all part of her show. She took breaks from the keyboard and the boys to shadow dance behind a folding screen on the stage. I’ve seen a lot of weird shows but this one left me speechless. We retreated to the sanity of the benches outside, and she reappeared. Loading her equipment (for a good frazzled thirty minutes) into an SUV with a sign on it advertising herself. The mysterious male backers were helping. The folding screen went into the SUV too. One hour later, Valerie Sassafras was back doing a psychy arm wave dance to honky tonk music. Clearly, Mid-City is the new hot neighborhood in New Orleans.