[Music] Welcome to The Virtual Memory Show, a podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and to be honest, this episode's going to be a lot more life than books, but you're good with that, right? My guess this time around is a woman named Miss Scorpio. She throws exotic costume parties in New York and also publishes a weekly email guide to underground awesomeness in the city. I haven't attended any of her gigs, but they look like a lot of fun if you're into, you know, burlesque and swing music, Russian baths, and the circus, and steampunk phenomena. Well, you get the idea. And this month, she's celebrating her 10th year of party hosting, from which she somehow manages to make a living. I tell you her real name, but it's more fun to interview somebody with a cool alias, you know? Anyway, you can go to Gemini and Scorpio.com to find out more details about the upcoming events and sign up for that weekly email guide. Her lip service pansexual kissing and cocktail parties are apparently going to get featured on an upcoming episode of 2020. And now, the Virtual Memory Show conversation with Miss Scorpio. Anyway, so my guest this episode of the Virtual Memory Show is Miss Scorpio, the person who runs Gemini and Scorpio, founder, what do we call you? Party producer extraordinaire. Okay, tell me what is Gemini and Scorpio? Gemini and Scorpio is a company that I accidentally started 10 years ago, where I produced themed costume parties with live entertainment, and I also put out New York City's second largest on-the-ground mailing list of interesting offbeat cultural events. How did you get started? So the accidental part of this was that 10 years ago, I was very actively doing online dating back before it was a popular thing that it's ultimately become. And Miss Gemini, who became my writing partner, she and I were going back and forth quite a bit on online dating advice to each other and ultimately realized we were saying in a book's worth of information. So we decided to do this Gemini and Scorpio thing that would be our advice to people doing online dating back when advice was very much needed. So the website and then the parties and the list were ultimately ways that we were trying to promote the book that never happened because the publishing world, as I'm sure you're aware, is incredibly short-sighted. What would have been your best piece of advice for online dating, given that it was 10 years ago? That's a very different environment than now. A lot of it still holds now and in fact the key piece of advice and what led to the creation of the list in the parties is you never want to do dinner in a movie as your internet date ever. You want to do something that is interesting and engaging that appeals to hopefully both of you and that way even if your date sucks, at least you're still having fun, at least you're still doing something you want to do. How has that area changed? We both have experience. I met my wife through online dating and I met my boyfriend through online dating. How different is it now? Which I'm very glad I don't have to participate in because that was nine years ago. That's ubiquitous. The big shift is really when we started out writing this guide, we wanted to normalize it. It still had that stigma from people knowing that kind of approach to dating as newspaper personals and it was a terrible thing. You didn't want to do that. That seemed like you were desperate. Yeah, exactly. So that was the aim and years ago what we were doing and these days is completely normal and that's what we said a decade ago. It's that it will become completely normal because we are the internet generation. We do everything online. Oh, we're old now. I know you're much younger than me. So that happened. Yeah, that's what I'm just sort of afraid to find out how the next generation's, you know, courting habits are going to change. Yeah, grinder. Yeah, that's what I was getting at. I was wondering if the whole grinder phenomenon. We predicted that. We totally predicted that. We said exactly that in the future it's going to be about the mobile dating where the different phone just chirps and says, "Hey, hop guide on the next walk." Do you think online dating has gotten to that grinder? It has the mainstream version of it essentially been gamed out like that, do you think? Or is there still a sense of, you know... It's starting to be, it's starting to... There's a still a sense of dating to it as opposed to, yeah, mating, I guess. Still, whatever you want out of it is what you're going to get out of it. So you can use a dating site for getting laid and you can use a sex site for getting dates. But I'm seeing now that the mobile stuff is leaking into the regular online dating area, and also the social media kind of expectation is leaking in there as well, because now that we're all so used to Facebook and Twitter and Four Square, you know, where are you now? What are you doing now? And it's all about this instant sharing with frequently gone those whom, in terms of online dating, suddenly you're seeing... You really are seeing that list of people who are in a neighborhood and looking for a date. What they mean by a date and what you mean by a date. That's between the two of you to figure out, but the technology is now there and the approach is now, is that. And how did it evolve from there? Because the parties, it's all the party's fault. We started doing, as makes sense, Valentine's Day parties. The idea being, let's create singles parties that don't suck. Well, they didn't suck to such an extent that we couldn't keep couples out. So every Valentine's Day we would get these pleading emails. I'm not single, but I promise to bring single people, can we please come to your party? And then we just gave up a couple of years in and then the production started going from just Valentine's Day to Halloween to New Years and now I'm producing at least once a month. What's your favorite location for a party? Well, now I'm torn. I have two. The big space that I work with for Halloween for New Years and also for my Steampunk Circus party. It's called the Irondale Center. It's in Brooklyn and it's part of a church. So you can imagine this 19th century church-like grandiose building with peeling walls and the hardwood floors and the wrap-around balcony. It's really quite impressive. And then I actually got my own space a year ago. So that's a huge focus of my attention. And that's a loft in Gowanis that I have been building out for a year, in fact, about to do a Kickstarter to try and raise some more money to keep going. So of course that has to be my favorite space. It's mine. What's the big move that you're going to make? What are you looking to fund with Kickstarter? I need to redo the... It's also... It's hardwood floors, it's bricks, it's window installation, it's ceiling. It's all the big stuff. Up until now, there's been a lot of electrical work, insulation, walls. So I've done all I could with my resources so far, but now I actually have to completely stop production in a space so that I can wreck and then rebuild the main event space. It's got to the point where I can no longer put it off nor can I do it while I'm doing other things. So in order for me to be fully focused on it and be able to afford it, it has to be Kickstarter. How big a party can you put there? How many people? Cops are not listening to this, right? No. That was going to be my next question. What sort of issues have you had regularly? In fact, I just found out I could fit more people than I thought I could. I hosted a lecture just on Tuesday with friends of mine who do... I wouldn't even say it's Trespass Theater, but it is very interesting immersive experiences in abandoned buildings that they have no right to be in. I've done a number of such trips with these guys and they were doing a lecture through an entity known as the Observatory Room, which is a fantastic space and lecture series in my neighborhood, on how to Trespass. Okay. Yeah, so it was too big for the Observatory Room and we moved it to my loft and at the end of the day, even with all the couches and chairs, there was lots of seating which normally cuts down attendance, we somehow fit 250 people. Observatory normally can do about 50, so I'm very glad we did it in my space. How do you reach out to that many? How do you get them and people to come? Sometimes it just goes viral. I think this one went a little bit viral, so as I said, I run this mailing list of underground events. So my own list, it's the second largest. I have really big reach myself. I also have press on my list and I think a couple of press people picked it up from my list. Then it went out to the other big underground list, which is Nonsense NYC. And in addition to that, our mutual friend who's also done these events, it is a tremendous writer, Dan Glass, just wrote it up for The Gothamists, also in the span of the last few days. So it was the perfect storm of publicity, so we actually had to turn people away also. Otherwise it would be trespassing. Oh, well, my landlord would not look kindly upon that. How did you, again, build that sort of database? I mean, what was that process like in those pre- Facebook days? It's like, congratulations and happy anniversary on 10 years of doing this. Thank you. Yes, this Valentine's Day coming up. It's 10 years. First Valentine's Day party was 2003. You have a big one in schedule? I've got lots of stubs in schedule. It's looking like there's going to be an immersive piece of theater being staged in the loft. I'm sort of wrapping up that planning right now, so it may be that the loft is being transformed into the forest of Arden for Shakespeare's Mid-Summer Night's stream. Very nice. And I think GNS is going to do a romantic, kind of cute, illicit thing with fairies and glitter and ralesque. That's her. Right, exactly. So that is being planned, and there's a couple of other things for 10th anniversary that I can't talk about yet, but big stuff is coming. So as far as how the list grew, the goal was to grow our own audience, because as I said, we were trying to market this book. We needed a pre-existing audience that might actually be interested in what we have to say. So the events list comes out every Friday, and that's a big part of how we get our audience. Initially, the thought was because we recommend that people don't do dinner in a movie, but do interesting things with their online date. It made a lot of sense to then recommend them an interesting thing that they could do. So to this day, the list comes out every Friday, and it's stuff that you really don't come across anywhere else. So that's a big way that the list grows, and then also when we do the parties, RSVPs, and people just signing up for the list because they find what we do interesting. We do get a lot of press, and every time there's an article out, we get a bump of activity to the mailing list. So Facebook is actually not even a huge factor. This was all grown before the social media revolution. Now there's a big Facebook presence for us, but it's not the main thing. How has New York changed over the time you've been both doing this and your pre-Arty kind of interactions with the city? In my experience, some parts of New York haven't changed at all, because what I've always been interested in is this, it's the underground culture, and no matter what you do to New York City, there are always going to be people who could create really interesting stuff out on the margins. So that still exists. What has changed though is to what extent we've all had to move out from the center. Virtually nothing happens in Manhattan anymore. Things have gotten as far out as deep corners of Brooklyn and Queens, and even Bronx now has started having more or two things. We're all being displaced. Also, post 9/11, it's gotten harder to do the really edgy illegal stuff, like the breaking into buildings. And there's a crackdown from department buildings and FDNY about the big illegal warehouse parties. The cash 22 is that you can't make the stuff legal. Even things that are as innocuous as what I do, which frequently is it's the steampunk and circus and burlesque in 1920 speakeasies. It's beautiful and it's really non-threatening, and even what I do cannot be made legal by New York City standards. So it's just harder to get away with some of this stuff now, but everybody still does it. What in particular means that it has to be illegal? What do you... There are many aspects to this. Health code side or... Department of Buildings and FDNY as I said. Okay, just really sort of breaking into the language. It's not a break in entering, is that you can't really get a certificate of occupancy for the right number of people. It's that you can't legally get a permit to serve drinks. There's just various very non-exciting mundane legislations that you can't get around legally. It's just not possible. But you feel that it serves a purpose, that sort of necessity of being under the the radar like this. Under the legal, basically doing this as a... We're going to do this anyway. Yeah, that's what I'm getting at. It's not that there's a purpose to it. I don't particularly revel in it being illegal. It's frequently an inconvenience, but I feel like the stuff that I do with my fellow underground producers do, it's important that it needs to exist. So perhaps the illegality gives it an edginess, but even without it, it's very necessary. And it'd be great if it could be done legally. And you see a lot of artists moving to places like Berlin right now because there's cheap space and lacks regulations. And the more of that there is, the more artists can do unusual and expected things. Can you talk about your other art? Outside party planning? There's been very little time for my other art. I wasn't sure. I thought maybe. It exists, but it's been severely cut down. I've been doing this on my own for as many years really as I've been doing it. So Ms. Gemini was never really part of the party planning part of it. She was she's a writer and an editor and was largely interested in the written part of it. And then she moved out to LA a number of years ago and it's really just been me. I just still go by Jevonah and Scorpio because it feels weird to say "I, I, I" it's I would just much rather say "we" it sounds better. I prefer the royal "we" when I'm describing the podcast of people. Yeah, it's the same thing. One guy. Yeah, it's, yeah. And it's self-supporting at this point. It completely took over my life and became a full-time job. Not a thing I was expecting or trying for. And have you had any sort of corporate interest or or sponsorship ideas? Not sponsorship so much and I'm really careful about sponsorship because nothing would kill the spirit of an underground party faster than brought to you by. Yeah, so there's not there's none of that. I occasionally get products. If there is a way to do a sponsorship as a partnership that makes sense that I would do that. But as far as corporate clients that mostly manifest itself in them hiring me to do what I do but with the real budget. Which is my next question. Do you do that relatively often? It's starting to pick up now because I do all of this by myself. I really don't have much time to develop business. No, no, not at all. But I did do a really fantastic event for the BBC last year. Oh, 2013 right last year. It was great. It was one of their upfront events and I did all the live in entertainment booking and it was essentially like one of my parties. It was this very elaborate 1920s peak easy and we did these feathered showgirls and aerial rings and terror readers and half dancers and 1920s jazz band. Did the British really have that that as a mentality or are they just seen that as sort of an idealized American? It's BBC America. Okay, so at least there were some you were okay, good because I just wonder if they would have some sort of fantasy vision of what we were writing and then translate. Oh, ambition. What were you thinking, you know, that whole era but what are the sort of companies that have fired you? I really don't do that many of those events. Partially, I'm really picky. I'm not really I don't want to do some boring offices corporate party and I don't really want to do somebody's wedding. So sometimes it's just like we like the Portlandian episode with the bad wedding planner in Portlandia. I have not seen that. Yeah, it was it was as you would expect, you know, people wanting a wedding that is so not a wedding. That's that's yeah. Yeah, exactly. So I I'm trying to avoid all that. At the same time, if somebody really wants their wedding to to be like one of my parties, they're welcome to have me do that. Then that's great. Now, who did you who've you gotten to meet through the course of putting on these parties whom you'd always vitalized or desperately want it to? It doesn't actually work that way. Rather, the way the process works is I discover amazing people that I didn't know through doing the events. So I may going out as sort of part of the job. I I have to stay aware of what's going on going on out there both because of the listings and and the parties. And I sometimes see these tremendously talented people doing shows that nobody knows about. It makes me really excited. Then I book them for GNS parties and I promote their events in the in the newsletter and I feel like that's the more exciting thing. I have common contact with some well-known talented people, but that ultimately is somehow less fun than than discovering talent that people don't know. What's also really fun is connecting the various circles that I'm in because I do travel in many and then I meet this talented person. We're here who really should know this talented person over there and then exciting collaborations happen. So you could have the Gemini and Scorpio very intimate dinner parties also. In fact I do dinner parties where are they themed though? See that's what I'm getting. No but my boyfriend and I invite people from our various social circles. You will have like a amount you know with missions to an Ivy League school talking on the couch to a porn star and that's a good dinner party. Nice. What was the last best memory you have from him or what was the party that really worked for you? What was the one that just you know you'll never top this? There is one that I've been doing since 2006 that consistently is like yep this is as me as it gets and it's just great and it really can get much better than this. It's the Russian Baths parties. I rent out a Russian bath house and I book a brass band and a DJ and we have the bath house to ourselves so it's everybody and we're like we're almost nothing doing the saunas and the jacuzzi while a brass band is playing. Sometimes in the jacuzzi I got the idea of when Ms. Gemma and I used to go to the bonya and dream about like how cool would it be? We could, etc. So a lot of time that's how the ideas were born. Now beyond the Russian Bath parties, is there an ideal space that you would kill to have? At church. I would totally kill to my own church. I would love to. Yeah that'd be great. That's part of my love. I don't know so much. It's beautiful and it's churchly. And basically party every night of the week or do you need to settle down at some point? I would not want to party. It's exhausting. I wouldn't even want to do a party every I mean I do a conference for my day job once a year and it's pretty much you know six months of build up and then a collapse for several weeks after so I can't imagine. So depending on how big the party is my recovery time is bigger. So Halloween and New Year's I sometimes disappear for a solid week. I mean disappear like not answer emails not pick up phone I'm just kind of tonic and then I come back and a week later email everybody going hey guys thanks for a party that was great. So I figured I would wait a little while after New Year's. I kind of figured that was your big blowout. I also realized that I'm really emailing in the morning was not not a smart move so I would wait till afternoon to draw the line and try to set something up. That makes sense. I frequently do a lot of work. My work day is sort of let's say between noon and midnight. I absolutely get business calls at eleven twelve at night. That's normal. While you're out at a club? Sometimes when I'm out sometimes I'm home working. Sometimes it really is office hours. So I want to thank you for coming on the show Miss Scorpio. Happy anniversary and stay fabulous. And that was Miss Scorpio. Her annual steamy Valentine's night at the Russian Baths is taking place Thursday Valentine's Day at the Brooklyn Bonya. She's celebrating her company's 10th birthday party after that with a fairy forest frolic the following Friday and Saturday the 15th and 16th that are lofting guanas. You can buy tickets for either event at Gemini and Scorpio.com. You got a spell out the hand. When you're there you can sign up for that weekly email or check out Miss Scorpio's presence on twitter and Facebook and flicker and tumbler and youtube and every other damn thing. Anyway I promise the podcast will be more book oriented in the next couple episodes. In fact I've actually recorded a few of them already and as far as I can recall there's no pansexual costume make-out sessions in any of them. I guess you'll just have to check out one of her parties sometime and report back. This was the Virtual Memories Show. You can find previous episodes or subscribe to the show on iTunes or visit the archive at chimeraobscura.com. I'm Gil Roth and you are awesome. Keep it that way. [Music] [Music] You
