The troupe doesn't only do raunch: they perform a cleaned-up version of the act for children's groups, and alter their performances to suit the venue. Still, they recognize that the sexual routines, the late-night shows, are what make them stand out. To Stephanie, these elements aren't titillating add-ons. "It's all about the power of the body, about the awe we feel at sexuality, its beauty," she argues. "These are muscles we never think about, that can do such thrilling things. In that way, there's no difference between an aerial act and a twat trick."
Some audiences take the implications literally: the couple has been invited to hang out in a lot of random hot tubs, and Stephanie is a magnet for couples looking for a third. ("I'm not interested in casual sex with my audience," she shrugs.)
Of course, that's not to say that everyone who sees them is turned on or thrilled by the sight of a naked contortionist or someone drinking their own pee. Audiences get grossed out, or angry; the troupe has had bottles thrown at them onstage. And then there are the cops. At a gig a few years back in tiny Slidell, Louisiana, Stephanie was interrupted midway through her introductory spiel for a troupe freak, The Horrible Bug-Eater. Stephanie was clad only in a top hat, a G-string, a jacket and a strap-on dildo wielding a black leather bullwhip when the door flew open and a bright light flooded the biker bar. It was the police, along with a film crew from a Cops-style local TV show. The Bindlestiffs froze; the cops froze; there was a long, freighted pause as they looked her up and down, taking in the silicone cock, and off to the side, a wild-eyed woman crunching a mouth full of crickets. "They just kind of turned tail and walked out," she laughs.
But a direct showdown is a rarity. The Bindlestiffs don't haggle with local venues. These are businesspeople too, they reason, and they don't want to cost anyone their liquor license because of nudity or illegal sex toys. Instead, Keith and Stephanie will announce to the audience why the local laws forbid them from performing their racier acts, a tactic guaranteed to get a crowd on their side.
Keith has toned down the anarchist jargon over the years, preferring to get the message across in subtler ways. "If you laugh, it's hard to be afraid of something," says Keith. "Like Scotty the Flaming Faggot he's just so sweet, so beautiful. It's utterly disarming." (A charismatic fairy in a blue bunny suit, Scotty gyrates, jingles finger-bells, strips, then submerges himself in red wine.) "There are states where if you just pull out a dildo, you've really pushed the envelope. Whereas in New York, you can walk into a place where a midget is fist-fucking somebody onstage, and in some places, that's the norm," he sighs. "Elsewhere, you don't have to cut off an arm or a penis to get applause."
Still, each time they revisit a location, they try to push things up a notch. There's burlesque striptease aerialist Tanya Gagne. There's Magic Brian, who blindfolds his audience volunteer, then pulls out his cock and says, "What? What?" There's Buckaroo Bindlestiff's Wild West Gender-Bender Jamboree, plus all manner of juggling, tightrope walking, piercing, rowdy music and the bed of nails.
But the lucky towns, the ones that get the whole deal, the ones that can go all the way they get the plate-spinning act.
It's the Bindlestiff trademark. It's what people make fun of when they want to make fun of them, and what they giggle about when they're thrilled.
Sometimes the troupe itself goes back and forth on whether to do it "It's on!" "It's off!" If the audience is wrong (drunken frat boys), Stephanie will give a thumbs down.
The routine doesn't look like Keith's initial brainstorm: "I had this image of nine asses, with sticks poking out of them," he recalls. Egalitarian, but he couldn't find nine willing asses. Perhaps it's for the best. As odd as it sounds, the act is elegant. Keith and Stephanie walk onstage, looking like nothing more than a courtly vaudeville couple: Stephanie wears a strapless black silk '50s cocktail dress, very Lucille Ball. Tinkly music plays. She hands him the white china plates one at a time, and he places them on the five background sticks, spinning the plates, in classic (or semi-classic) Ed Sullivan Show fashion, rippling the white china with his fingertips and the flats of his palm.
Then his lovely assistant drops to the ground, and in one graceful move, tilts onto her back and upends, so that her pumps float in the air. Her skirt falls back over her torso, revealing pale showgirl gams, spread wide, and her ass; her face is hidden. Keith takes a dildo, pulls on a condom, lubes it up, twists it inside her, and then places a spin-stick inside that. It's a little sick-making, this private thing in public. And then Stephanie begins to make the stick turn in circles gently, using just the muscles inside her. When Keith places the plate atop the stick, it spins like the others.
As the audience roars, Keith runs back and forth, keeping things going, the plates glimmering like tiddlywinks: sexual, not sexual, sexual, not sexual. It's uncomfortable and harmonious at once, and like most things you've never seen before, it gives you weird ideas. For one: What if sex was more like this? An act. One person spinning another with such tender frenetic attention to velocity, to balance. The loving teamwork of two show-offs. Two athletes. Two clowns.
"I do all the work," Keith shrugs. "She gets all the applause."
The troupe doesn't only do raunch: they perform a cleaned-up version of the act for children's groups, and alter their performances to suit the venue. Still, they recognize that the sexual routines, the late-night shows, are what make them stand out. To Stephanie, these elements aren't titillating add-ons. "It's all about the power of the body, about the awe we feel at sexuality, its beauty," she argues. "These are muscles we never think about, that can do such thrilling things. In that way, there's no difference between an aerial act and a twat trick."
