‘Tis a Very Saucy Christmas

This gives new meaning to the term “booth babe.” View slideshow SAN FRANCISCO – Somehow, Victorian England and Christmas are closely linked in the American mind. This is probably the fault of one Charles Dickens, who wrote A Christmas Carol, the most overexposed Christmas story of all time, and that includes the Nativity.

Dickens is honored at the annual Great Dickens Christmas Fair and Victorian Holiday Party at the Cow Palace in San Francisco.

The huge hall and exhibition space is filled with sawdust, Victorian bits and pieces and actors ready to indulge in a bit of Cockney cosplay. The general public is then invited to experience old England while parting with modern American currency.

You might think that Charles Dickens and Christmas are the two things that American culture hasn't spiced up, and fortunately you'd be wrong.

The Dickens Fair offers a series of entertainment events called London After Dark. The distractions are so blatantly and obscenely sexual by Victorian London standards that they would give a governess the fumes from more than 1,000 feet away. By modern standards, that's about PG-13.

The first part of the London After Dark program was a visit to the Dark Garden store, a legendary custom corset shop in San Francisco.

Few cities could support a handmade corset company – San Francisco demands one. At the fair, Dark Garden will present a group of all-volunteer corset models depicting Victorian archetypes such as the “cheeky chimney sweep,” the “cheeky temperance advocate,” and the “Scotman in a corset.”

I asked the owner, Autumn Adamme, if the corsets were exact replicas of Dickens-era underwear. She explained that while they were Victorian inspired, the design wasn't actually Victorian.

While Victorian corsets were initially reinforced with whalebone and cardboard, her corsets are made of spring steel. Furthermore, it would be unlikely that a Victorian corset would fit a modern person.

“Women wore corsets from a young age,” she explained. “So that their bones had a different shape.”

Next up was the French Postcard Tableaux Review. This is so popular that there is a line outside the show to get into the show. If you want a proper place for the naughty stuff, you'll need to attend the sing-along that precedes it.

I admit that I saw the female birthday suit. My gaze perhaps stopped on one or two Frank Frazetta prints or the pewter amulet of the Venus of Willendorf. And yet there's a particularly strange feeling that comes from watching a man in period garb singing “The Man on the Flying Trapeze” while waiting to see some skin. I think I would have felt less dirty if I had stayed home and spent the whole evening typing the names of various body parts into Google image search.

I needn't have felt so shabby; The show was less naughty than naughty and sillier than both. The Tableaux review was framed as a conversation between Mr. and Mrs. Horatio Everhard, with various double entenders and naughty puns. It was illustrated by models such as a French maid with peek-a-boo bottoms, a pair of free angels, and a group of nymphs and satyrs. If Jim Henson had been interested in corsets, this is how The Muppet Show would have turned out.