Deep Dish Toronto: Issue #767

Snap Gala
Thurs, March 6 ^@ Andrew Richard Designs

The thing about paddles is that they can be used to spank the bare bottom of some hot go-go dancer or they can be used to bid on one-of-a-kind photographic art for charity. Tonight the latter is the case. We’re in the upper showroom of Andrew Richard Designs ready to raise our paddles for the annual Snap Gala fundraising auction for the AIDS Committee of Toronto. Downstairs, in the silent auction room, white dividers displaying even more photos separate the room like mountain peaks. The works on these walls quietly call out to guests as they loudly roam the valleys with hard liquor in hand. The night brings out old friends, new acquaintances and some old friends who have acquired new faces. Botox is the new black. Very slimming. Looking wonderful, TV veterans Steven Sabados and Chris Hyndman are here chatting with model Yasmin Warsame, new bar magnate Glen Baxter sneaks in late with a date, and the ever-gorgeous Traci Melchor is busy rubbing her face into the beefy he-chests of some half-naked TD Canada Trust art handlers. As with other years, some pieces do not sell, but those that do sell very well. Take Lot 36, Rob MacInnis’s untitled portrait of five very different farm animals all posed perfectly in a misty field as if they had paid for a Walmart family photo. Its curious quality almost doubles its estimated value, selling for $4,300. I wonder if the animals signed a contract? Do they get a percentage?

Pitbull Fourth Anniversary Party
Sat, March 8 @ The Phoenix

The thing about jockstraps is that they can be worn secretly under your Cavalli suit while you sip wine at a charity auction, or you can strip off your tailored ensemble and let your strapping package start another kind of bidding war. The latter is happening all over the Phoenix Concert Theatre tonight as Pitbull celebrates its fourth woofing year. The stage and the go-go-dance podiums are teeming with bulging brutes (some bulging out of their jocks) doing more than posing and dancing for the drooling crowd below. The show that Jon Shield, Aleks Buldocek, Zack Acland and others are putting on is no show. It’s quite real. Which makes it quite good. Really. Grabbing, groping, sloppy kissing, doggy-styling. What did organizers Frances Gaudreault and Steve Palmer put in their water? It’s like we’re witnesses to soft-core sex acts in many acts, a play of foreplays, a Horny Award–winning masturbatory musical all choreographed to the humping, thumping beats of DJs John Caffery, Sumation and the delectable Deko-ze. And like osmosis of the groin, these pseudo sex acts spread to the dancefloor. Even the sweet, innocent-looking hot nerd with the glasses and plaid shirt I’m dancing with is bitten by the hump-bug and lunges aggressively at my crotch with his ass as if he were in a porno of his own making. I never signed a contract. Do I get residuals?

Deep Dish appears in every second issue of Xtra and every two weeks on dailyxtra.com.