I really thought I’d heard it all when I endured the Spaulding Gray monologue about the banana-shooting snatches of certain Cambodian sex show performers (the descriptive cockroach scuttle flourishes are what made it Art, you know). But then I had not heard of Flaming Yoko, the Japanese stripper who shoots a stream of fire from where the sun don’t usually shine.

From the apparently-now-defunct-but-still-well-worth-a-read Stripper Blog:

“From the time I was a little girl, I thought about doing something that would make people notice me, and enable me to tour the country,” says the woman, who is identified throughout only by her professional moniker “Honoo no Yoko” (Flaming Yoko).

It looks to me like she got her wish.

As the classic strip club techno began, Yoko would gracefully peel off her clothing and proceed to a series of eight routines. All involved use of the highly developed muscles in her reproductive apparatus. While not necessarily in the following order, she makes use of her vaginal sphincter to toot notes from a toy trumpet; click a toy clacker; twist the screw-off cap from a bottle of Oronamin C vitamin tonic; snap a wooden pencil in half; bend a metal spoon; inhale smoke from a cigarette and blow rings; and make like a blowgun, shooting darts to pop toy balloons. In fact, a dart once propelled this way was clocked at 180 mph, as fast as if somebody had thrown it by hand.

Then came the climax of her stage performance, the routine from she got the stage name “Flaming Yoko”: She would inject a quantity of alcohol into her vagina, part her thighs and spurt the liquid towards a waiting flame.

It really is astonishing that a woman who’s been able to do that since she was a teenager (and she is 39) hasn’t been able to save up enough to retire. What’s wrong with the sex show market, people! Given what the poor suckers pay at Brandi’s just to get a lap grind to old Bon Jovi songs, you’d think that a hawt flaming Japanese cooter would earn you a nice view house in Santa Monica mountains and a Jaguar in less than five years, but apparently not.

Then again, ponder for a moment the Freudian overtones; I can’t imagine the tips are that great. Hey, thanks for reminding me of my castration anxiety! Here’s a nickel. Nuclear flaming vaginas would be, one would assume, right up there in the “worst nightmare” stakes with vagina dentatas and those antirape devices involving steel sheathes garnished lavishly with barbed spikes.

Flaming Yoko is still flaming away, and probably will be until she needs a walker to get onstage, so book your trip to Japan now. A note: the first two rows of the audience are well advised to avoid wearing nylon.

Word to your mother.

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