transretrogurl

Just got home from a one-off session at the sublime Boys Will Be Girls, where I modelled 16, yes *16* outfits in a day. And then went clubbing.

With a difference.

Wind back. I decided to treat Cindy and Vicky to a meal at my favourite restaurant in London, Cantina Laredo. As an aside, and obviously this isn’t a food blog, if you get a chance and you’re ever in London, go there. You won’t regret it – modern Mexican with delicious flavours. Anyway, I met C&V there in drab, unshaven, for a fun night of gossip and good food. Fast forward a bottle and a glass of a fantastic Merlot (and yes, that was *me* drinking the wine all by my lonesome. See previous discussions on compulsive behaviour or just scan read a couple of old blog posts for details) and conversation moved to what we’d do on Saturday night after my dressing appointment.

Pictured – if I’d gone to the Wayout this is what i’d have worn. Well, not really, but I think this is a very sweet outfit….

The plan had been to go to the Wayout because a: I never learn and b: I’m convinced that if I keep going one time it will be superb. But, after copious amounts of good alcohol, another plan was hatched.

There’s a club night in London called Torture Garden. Yeah, yeah, the name should have given it away but I think of myself as a girl/man of the world, and it sounded fun. So when Cindy suggested that we should try it instead of Wayout, it seemed like the best idea in the world.

And it was. But not for the reasons intended.

I’d never heard of it before but was intrigued. Plus there was a strict fetish dress code, which kinda appealed to the drunken idiot in me. So Cindy ordered three tickets online and we carried on with the delicious meal.

Fast forward nine or so hours – I wake in the hotel room. Well, wake isn’t quite the term – I was drunken unconscious and then I was awake, mouth feeling like every single iota of liquid had been roasted out of it, my head pounding like, well, a dehydrated post-alcoholic cranium. The tops of my legs had some serious nappy rash – when I shave for a session I get a little over enthusiastic (more of that in a moment) and my attitude to shaving is to draw the safety razor up and down as fast as I can until all the hair is obliterated. No finesse, just good old fashion savagery. Which leads to some serious razor burn, always at the top of the legs. So, between the mouth that felt like the underside of a rug, the head that was chiming the hours of the day every second and the rash that made it feel like I was sat in a jacuzzi full of pepper-spray it was a fine way to start the day.

Pictured – the hangover disappeared quickly, dressing like a Spice Girl will do that.

And then I remembered the idea about the club.

See, I’m not brave. Well, I am, but not when it comes to being out and about enfemme. There’s something about it that makes me feel very vulnerable, and not in a ‘ooo, what a nice feeling, feminine, to be delicate’ but more of a ‘every single person out there is going to take offence at my attempt to look sexy-ish and I’m going to end up in casualty’ way. So, on top of the hangover I now had a sense of impending dread. In fact, the sense of dread actually overpowered the hangover because I knew the best way to deal with it was to be ‘three sheets to the wind’. Standard Sarah/me cunning plan actually.

A quick spoiler – Torture Garden wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t me. I have to say right now that the whole theology around Torture Garden is beautifully simple and well executed – zero tolerance to silliness, and a license to be as fetishistic as possible. But I get ahead of myself.

I had a *fantastic* day – the next blog post will be a gush on the sixteen outfits we did and the girlie fun I had, but let’s fast-forward through that for now and get to the amusement.

Pictured – but first, some more Geri Hallwell-ing

So, I find myself, at 21:30, sat on the floor in Cindy’s dressing room, wearing only a hair-cap, secured by hair-pins that felt that they were scrambling various memories, and a good old fashioned girdle. After ten hours of a tight corset I was letting the middle age spread, well, spread for a bit while Cindy and Vicky got ready. I was checking the photos from the shoot and secretly starting to panic – I wasn’t going to be able to get out of going out, even though I’d paid in advance (which madly seems to give me the confidence to not do things that terrify me, who’d have thought it?). But the whole momentum was shifting to going out and, even as I sat there almost comfortable without the scaffolding of female underwear, I knew I’d be going out.

And we’d chosen an outfit that couldn’t have been any less revealing or adventurous. A very tight PVC high neck dress, if dress is the right word, large prosthetic boobies, f*ck-me metal-heeled black stilletos and my favourite wig, the blonde one we call ‘Phoebe’ because it reminds me of the character from friends.

Now, this is after ten hours of posing, bending, kneeling, tottering on top of a doozy of a hangover, three nights of minimal sleep (it’s been uncomfortably hot in jolly old England) and the usual insane levels of stress I get whenever I have a session.

Pictured – bending, tottering, posing – totally worth it….

And there were other things that were worrying me. Firstly, we’d be taking a taxi (there and back, more of that later) which meant for the first time ever I’d be getting into a public taxi completely enfemme. Secondly, the club was very fetish-y. That doesn’t sound like much but you have to remember that a: I’ve only ever been in one T-nightclub, and that was only twice and b: up until this point I’d never, ever, been in a fetish nightclub.

I didn’t know what to expect. Add the fact that I was wearing an outfit that really prohibited running (it was out of the question), I’d be a taxi ride away from safety, and I was nowhere near drunk enough, and I was, well, a little worried.

So we bolted me into my armour, which involved squeezing the middle-aged bod back into the tight corset, applying the heavy (and warm) false breasts, touching up the makeup (I’m sad to admit it but I’d eaten almost an entire pizza and drunk three cans of Punk IPA during the day, topped up with a couple of vodka and cokes to try and quell the shrieking demon inside, so my lippy was in a state), grabbing my purse (which I had strategically filled with money, phone, Chanel No.5, a bottle of nail glue, and two condoms. Which I then took out because there was *no* way I was tempting fate by having those in there).

Then on with the feet-killing heels, and before I knew it we were outside the door, Vicky and Cindy elegantly swishing their ways towards the waiting cab while I stumbled in a very unlady-like way to the car.

Ahh, the car.

See, when you’re wearing five inch heels and you top off at, say, 6ft 7in, and are wearing the kind of PVC dress that isn’t even pretending to be decent getting into the back of a standard car, not a black cab, is, err, difficult. I ended up sat in a not very lady-like position, the skirt of the dress doing a very fair impression of a tight belt whilst the top of my fishnet stocking, plus the bottom of my girdle, were very much visible.

Pictured – try to imagine squeezing this into the back seat of a car. Now good luck un-imagining it….

Cue 20 mins of alternately trying to uncrick my neck and wind down my dress. We arrived at the club, an interesting place called ‘Fire’ near Vauxhall station, and to my horror the taxi-driver stopped outside a 24hour kebab place, populated by drunks trying to soak up the night’s alcohol. It was 23:00 at this point, so I gingerly extricated myself from the back seat of the car, pulled down my PVC dress to the top of my thighs, and carefully tottered along the pavement, trying not to make eye-contact with the kebab eaters.

So the club.

As I said, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the Torture Garden. It just turns out that I’ve reached the age where the perfect club for me, as a T-chick, would be comfy sofa, quiet classical music, sipping sherry or port while I regale fellow girls with amusing stories of the pitfalls of transvestism.

This was nothing like that……

After getting searched to get in (good security, can’t fault them, although if they were under any impression I could hide anything in the skin-tight dress and tight corset they were deluded) we made it inside.

Wow.

I’m not saying I’m a prude but holy hellfire, there was a lot of skin on show. The standard outfit for subs seemed to be fishnets, waist-cinchers and little black tape crosses on the boobs. And that was it. There were people in rubber animal suits, SS uniforms, nothing but paint, the whole works. To say I felt a little out of place would be similar to saying that Trump might not be so good as a president.

We made our way to the bar, which involved a lot of rubber-on-PVC moments that, if I’d been 18 years old and hadn’t spent the last 20 years overdosing on hard-core porn on the internet would have been very sensual, but now it was terrifying. I pretty much downed the first pint of cider, through a straw to maintain at least a modicum of femininity and to preserve the lipstick. before Cindy nudged me and pointed over to the corner where, about six feet away from me, a girl in a seriously tight and kinky pink rubber outfit was on her knees, err, servicing her boyfriend.

It just got weirder from there. We spent thirty minutes in a seriously dark part of the club watching the 50 person long queue to the women’s toilets gradually filter in – I was dying for a leak at this point but, being my height and not entirely feminine in mannerisms when terrified, I ended up popping into the blokes which didn’t have a queue. Felt kinda odd hiking up the PVC, pulling down the girdle and bum-pads to alleviate the throttling pressure on my bladder but given the fact the guy to the left of me was wearing feathers while the guy to the right of me was the spitting image of a rubber-obsessed female friend of mine from back in the day made it both easier and much, much harder to get a decent pee-stream going.

Back out into the club and I discovered that 2018 nightclubs are dark, loud and have lots of steps for some reason. We wandered around through the crowds, me following C&V on autopilot while my inner bloke was having a panic attack.

After watching an Asian woman perform a pole-dance that even turned the pole on we decided to step out into the outside air to see if we could chat without screaming. During the time in the club I’d been introduced to a retired trans-domme who looked stunning, beautiful, intelligent and articulate. Or I assume so, all I could hear was the sound of my own eardrum being beaten like a red-headed step-child, but she smiled a lot, touched my arm and said something to me. I nodded like I’d heard whatever it was and smiled at her while my inside people were running around the control centre of my brain trying to turn all the alarms off.

I’d gone past being concerned about what people would think of the heavily made up, PVC-wrapped middle aged man and was having nice little daydreams of being wrapped up in a quilt on a cold winter night. Not in the club.

Pictured – not a quilt, but my mind was going back to being wrapped in a 1940s red hostess dress….

Anyway, we ended up outside and something happened that was very sweet and highlighted why I’ll never *get* clubs, while still not hating them. We stood outside contemplating getting our coats and opposite us, stood by the door to the club but under the sky which was rapidly cooling, stood a woman.

She was wearing the standard outfit of the subs – the heels, fishnets, small black panties and waist cincher, and black tape over her nipples. And nothing else.

And in that moment all I could think of was that I had to get her a coat. She looked so cold that I just felt for her. I stood there, feet absolutely stinging, tightly wrapped in a seriously kinky and should-have-been-arousing-me female outfit, my boobs pushed out in front of me, my blonde hair covering my eyes and having to be pushed aside all the time, my handbag chain wrapped around my red-nailed hands. And all I could think of was how on earth I’d find a coat for the poor girl who was obviously freezing.

Then her dom came out and ordered her back into the club.

Torture Garden was superb – everyone was friendly, there was no sense of fear, everyone was being themselves and really getting into the scene. Except me. I didn’t hate it – far from it, it was an experience that I loved as an experience, but it just wasn’t me.

And it struck me that I haven’t changed – I’ve always hated nightclubs, even when they were full of heavy metal people and the music was everything I wanted to hear. I always spent 95% of my time thinking about how nice it would be to be sat in bed with a book and a glass of hot chocolate. For f*cks sake, I think I was born aged 70.

So we ended the evening with signalling for a cab, standing in the road at a busy interchange trying to find it while drunks wandered around us. My fear level had disappeared – I’d gone to some inner comfort zone where drab-me was hiding under a quilt and Sarah was sulking in her room. The taxi back was another exercise is trying to unpeel PVC from my butt-crack every fifteen seconds while giggling with Cindy, before we ended up back at her place where I peeled off all the feminine attire, washed off the makeup, before crashing on Cindy’s pull-out sofa.

The moral of this story? There isn’t one – the club was fantastically different and I didn’t hate it. It just wasn’t me, in a sad way, because some part of me wanted to be free enough to embrace that culture. But even tottering around on high heels wearing a PVC dress that would turn on half of the male population couldn’t change the fact that I’d be much, much happier in a 1940s tea dress, sipping something alcoholic with my legs crossed, spinning the hours away with insightful conversations that I could actually hear.

Pictured – my perfect attire for an afternoon quietly chatting with the girls….

I am officially a grumpy old man/quiet loving retro girl. And that’s not such a bad thing….

Stay beautiful, live a little, but always know where you want to really be.

Pictured – the outfit did rock though……