Heather Holiday breathed a sigh of relief today knowing that her and The Pretty Things Peepshow could hit the road again.
The burlesque sideshow troupe recently created a Kickstarter campaign with hopes of raising enough for a new van.
“Our RV was made in the 80’s and has seen better days,” Heather says. “After our last tour, we knew he had exhausted her!”
Not only, did they achieve their financial goal of $10,000, but they exceeded it by a little over $1500. The replacement van sounds like it is definitely a necessity for the group.
“We call it a frankenbus because the repairs are so odd,” Holiday told me via email. “We’ve got a load of duct tape and bolts sticking out of the walls! Plus we gutted the inside and modified it for sleeping and storage purposes.” But the frame wasn’t made for their new interior, so about a year ago, the back end started to sag, and their RV began to slowly pull apart.
Heather Holiday has been quite a familiar face in the sideshow business. Specifically, she’s known as the Sword Swallower at The Coney Island Sideshow. How does one begin a life as a sideshow superstar, you ask? Well Heather Holiday helps breakdown her rise to stardom.
Heather started in show business in her high school years, when she began interning at the Coney Island Circus Sideshow. Despite her lacking any previous performing experience, she got her first break due to a cast shortage.
“They put me on stage my first day in patched black jeans and doc martens!” Holiday said. “I had no skills, but a pretty cute face (if I do say so)”.
While most internship duties include coffee runs, answering telephones and various other grunt work, Heather was playing the part of the “Skin” in the actual show. The “Skin” is the attractive, yet silent girl on stage, similar to a magician’s assistant.
“I was the Vanna White of the sideshow,” she said.
After her internship was completed, Dick Zigun, or as Holiday refers to him, the unofficial Mayor of Coney Island, explained to her that she was “certainly attractive enough” to hold on to that job for the summer. So she did what any other idealistic and adventurous 16-year old would do; she went for it.
Now, of course performing can’t only be mastered by incremental experience. Since she didn’t have any previous skills or training, she decided that she’d sit in on special sideshow school classes to, at the very least, get the basics down.
“The sideshow school can’t teach you how to be a performer, and most skills take years to learn,” explained Heather. “But it does teach you safety: How to go about learning stuff without hurting yourself”.
The school did teach her such acts as basic fire manipulation and human blockhead, which is an act that involves the performer hammering a nail into their nasal cavity. Don’t be too alarmed. While it may appear as though the nail is being hammered into the performer’s skull, this act plays on the anatomical misconception that the nasal cavity goes upward, when it in fact goes straight back.
Holiday has adamantly reported that she is not a fan of performing as the Human Blockhead.
Sword swallowing, on the other hand, wasn’t necessarily a trick that she picked up from classes.
“Sword swallowing for the most part was pretty self-taught,” Holiday says. “With some help and direction from pros toward the end.”
From there, Heather began her life into the world of sideshow performance via the Coney Island Sideshow. She’s performed countless times in Coney and has reaped some really cool benefits from the gig, such as getting her own beer made after her, along with the other sideshow members, and even becoming Vice’s girl of the month at one point.
According to Heather, it was about 7 years later that she left Coney to pursue a road show with her “strictly plutonic life partner”, Danny Vomit. This show was the The Pretty Things Peep Show.
“ Our show formula was to take all the ‘pretty’ and ‘glam’ of classic Burlesque, and mix it with the talent and danger of Sideshow for the perfect combo of Thrills, Chills and Frills”, Holiday said. “And I think it works pretty damn good.”
Pretty Things is the “brainchild” of burlesque dancer Go-Go-Amy, who had performed on tours such as The Brothers Grim Sideshow, Warped Tour and Ozzfest. In an effort to preserve the bizarre and beautiful aspects of the sideshows, along with her own burlesque roots, she set forth to create Pretty Things.
The Pretty Things Peepshow acts include sword swallowing, human blockhead, fire eating, juggling, glass walking, straight jacket escape, burlesque, whip cracking, knife throwing, animal traps, live music, comedy and much more. Their first tour was in January 2009, and they’ve done over 400 shows since then, including Ozzfest 2010 with Ozzy Osbourne, Rob Halford and Motley Crue among others, the Thunder in the Rockies Festival with Foreigner and headlining the Wintersun Nostalgia Festival in Australia.
Life on the road has definitely gotten to Heather from time to time, who says that maintaining a “normal” life under those conditions is almost impossible. On the other hand, as a native New Yorker, she appreciated her time away from the city.
“Touring 8 months out of the year gives me that distance from the city that I need,” Heather said. “Plus, I meet great people and see the tiniest unknown towns that no one would think to visit.“
Heather Holiday will once again be joining The Pretty Things Peepshow for their upcoming 3-month tour, which kicks off on May 11th in Coney Island. She is also a VJ on MTV and a host of the MTV Iggy Show.
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