Valentine's

Hello again :)

So...last night, I attended my third Club Noir, and my first masked ball.

For those of you who don't know what Club Noir is, it's the biggest burlesque club in the world. It's held four or five times a year, usually at the O2 Academy Glasgow (although it has been to the Edinburgh Fringe festival and the Connect Festival too). It's usually featured in noted publications such as The List Magazine and it usually sells well - indeed this event sold out about a week prior, although this doesn't beat the Halloween 2009 event's record of 17 days.

Anyway...upon discovering shortly before Christmas that their Valentine's event was going to be a Venetian masked ball, I got stupidly excited. I badgered my friend Ashley - who is also my flat mate - to get the tickets (I'd bought the Halloween ones when we went to that). Organisation-wise it kind of went to pot. It was initially going to be me, her, her boyfriend and our friend Meredith, who I met on a school trip to Japan / Australia four and a half years ago when we still lived in Shetland (no, I didn't go to private school, honest). Meredith was also hoping to entice her boyfriend to come, but eventually a few weeks back she had to message me over Facebook saying she couldn't make it. So it would just be the three of us.

So yesterday, Ashley got an emergency phone call from her mam, and had to go back home. Out of respect for her and her family, I'm not gonna go into detail, but she ended up texting to say they couldn't make it either. So inevitably I panicked, wondering what to do about these two spare tickets I now had on my hands and thinking months of planning would have to go to pot. The first thing I did was to text around my friends asking frantically if they wanted to take these tickets off my hands. Help came in the form of my good friends Sian and Eilidh, who decided they'd come with me, having nothing better to do. Sigh of relief was breathed, and I cooked my tea (chicken katsu curry, courtesy of the YO! Sushi cookbook. Didn't look so good but tasted great), threw on my outfit and bobbed along on my merry way to meet them at Central Station, before getting the subway to where the O2 Academy is.

We had a great time. The bill for this event was the best one I've seen definitely. Having the guys from Scottish Opera singing at it was inspired. The only disappointment was the lack of a number from Lou Hickey, because she really is a lovely singer. Apart from that, top notch.



I'm on the right. My mask was from Mask Heaven, who I found by randomly Googling them - nice one, eh? My dress and bolero are from Vivien of Holloway. I saw no less than four other people wearing dresses from the same shop. It's also the reason for the name of this blog - Blue Dress Press. Geddit? My jewellery was courtesy of RockLove Jewellery, who I'll say more about another time. And to my left is the lovely Sian.

This here is Eilidh, on the right with orange hair.



A good night was had in all, and I can't wait for the next one - hopefully I'll still be living in Glasgow when it comes around!