Hot Tickets: Seattle – Halloween Edition!

Every Thursday at noon, PST, Brown Paper Tickets posts upcoming events happening in the Seattle. Here are hot tickets for events coming up. Check back for stellar events that fit the interests of locals and tourists alike.

TONIGHT, October 27 | The Bushwick Bookclub: The clubs one-year anniversary show! This is not your run of the mill book club. Much like any, they act upon the urge to read and to have discussions about what they read. But they found that this was not enough for them. When they read books, they also want to write songs about them. And when they write songs, they like to perform them for an audience. This month’s book is Stephen King’s The Shining!

Friday, October 28 and Saturday, October 29 | Halloween Edition! The Heavenly Spies in Betty Burlesque!: Seattle’s most glamorous and award winning burlesque troupe The Heavenly Spies are back this fall after 7 years of sold out shows and ready to shimmy and shake your socks off in their newest show Betty Burlesque! The Heavenly Spies began as a little known cabaret/burlesque group titled: Ultra and the Satin Dolls by a group of eager-to-perform Cornish graduates in early 2004. In 2005 after many changes the defunct Dolls, changed names, members and became The Heavenly Spies. They made their mark in the Neo-Burlesque movement in 2007 as the winners in Burlesque’s most prestigious competition The Miss Exotic World Pageant and have continued to wow sold out audiences with their death defying high kicks and gravity defying hair.

 

Remembering Edgar Allen Poe – Master of the Macabre.

As I said in my blog post yesterday, this month, in the spirit of Haloween, I’m going to focus on events that have a dark, morbid or slightly twisted bent to them. I talked a little about Grand Guignol theater yesterday and today I want to focus on events that feature one of the best-known authors of the macabre: Edgar Allen Poe.

Of course, one can’t think of dark storytelling without thinking of Edgar Allen Poe. When one examines Poe’s life, it’s not hard to see why he was drawn to the morbid: his mother died when he was young and his father abandoned the family, his wife died of tuberculosis at the age of 25 and he died at 40. The prevalence of death in his life might explain his fascination with death, premature burial, decomposition and the reanimation of the dead and his choice to pursue a career through writing alone, which pretty much guaranteed an existence of poverty and hardship. However, despite a life of relative obscurity and financial insecurity, today he is credited with inventing detective fiction, being a major contributor to the emerging science fiction genre and for being one of the earliest short story writers. And, of course, one can’t get through any Halloween season without hearing “The Raven” recited or quoted at least once. So, while in life he suffered, in death he is celebrated, revered and remembered fondly.