Pickled Punk

Performers aim to please

By Leslee Rasco
The Amarillo Independent

An enormous fire erupts into the night breaking the silence of a squeamish audience. While the fire dies, the sounds of gasps can be heard as bare feet trample across a path of broken glass.

Photo by Ralph Duke Smokin' Hot: Hell'n Fury swallows fire. For more photos, click here.

Needles and sledge hammers line the stage, and a bed of nails looms in the darkness behind the performers.

Hell'n Fury and Drew Blood are the two responsible for this seeming madness.

This dynamic duo is shocking Amarillo with its performance troupe, the Pickled Punk Sideshow.

The Pickled Punk Sideshow has been performing acts of sideshow curiosity for two years with a repertoire of more than 30 acts — many of which include painful body piercing and finger snapping.

Fury began her work as a flame performer five years ago. She studied with Firegod, a legendary sideshow entertainer, but her training was only two days.

The Firegod chose to train Fury only because she had taken the initiative to learn the basics of flame dancing.

Blood wasn't so lucky dealing with Firegod.

"I kind of harassed him to teach me to swallow swords, but I hadn't earned my chops yet so he blew me off completely," Blood said, adding that Firegod told him he didn't deserve the training.

"So that kind of put a little fire in my belly, and I said, 'Fine, I'll teach myself,'" Blood said.

Fury and Blood's original venture into sideshow was through Fury's burlesque dance troupe, the Whiskey Makin' Mommas.

The troupe featured a human tip jar, an act in which audience members staple their tips into human skin instead of tossing the money into a jar.

It wasn't until January 2006, in Laredo, that the two began performing together as a sideshow.

But that first performance wasn't all planned out. Fury had been invited to fire dance at the opening of a rock club, but the club wanted an hour and a half performance, which is nearly impossible with fire, Blood said.

So the plan was for Fury to perform her scorching acts for the allotted time with Blood entertaining between them. As the two began to lose the audience's attention, Blood had to pick up some of the acts to keep the show going.

And the Pickled Punk Sideshow was born.

The duo now performs every couple of months in between Amarillo and Lubbock.

"Its hard to do it often enough with the damage we do to our bodies, so we try to make big events out of our shows and do them once every couple of months," Blood said.

But with every show come risk and danger. As performers, Fury and Blood have to maintain the audience's attention without hurting themselves. But that cannot always be avoided. "We definitely take risks in what we do," Fury said. "It's not always perfect."

Fury has gone to the emergency room only once. She sliced her foot during a broken-glass routine. To keep the audience's attention, she jumped too hard and came away needing nine stitches in the bottom of her foot.

So far that is the worst that has happened, Fury said.

As the Pickled Punk Sideshow increases its acts, so do the danger and level of trust.

"We have a lot of trust between us," Fury said. "It's really important. I trust that he is focused with that machete and is not going to hurt me."

To Fury and Blood the Pickled Punk Sideshow is somewhat of a hobby.

"We are both big fans of sideshow," Fury said. "When and if we get to catch a show, we always try to see one. It's always worth it. We love looking at the old posters, banners. All that stuff is important and interesting to us."

Nor is the Pickled Punk Sideshow their source of income. It's a way to express their love of performing.

"Any money we make off of the show gets invested back into the show," Fury said." It pays the bills for the bed of nails we just built. We always end up breaking even or covering ourselves. We don't really make any money off of this at all. We both still have day jobs, so that's another proof that its about the love of performing."

Their love of performing often leads to daily rehearsals and pushes them to create new acts for each show.

Blood said, "We don't want to give the impression that we flail around with this stuff. We practice a lot. We've both got at least some basic medical knowledge. Even though we give the impression that these things just happen, once we are on stage it's a very polished show."

"Very little in sideshow is original," Blood said. "It's a lot of stuff that has been around since the 1700s and 1800s. The bed of nails has been around in India for hundreds of years. So a lot of it is traditional stuff that we try to put a little spin on, make it a little more rock 'n' roll in the stage show.

"It changes every time because Amarillo is a small enough market to where the same people are seeing us. And we want it to be shocking and surprising and fun every time so it's kind of like a play. I write a whole script out."

The most recent show included flame swallowing and dancing, a machete act, eating a light bulb, drinking Windex, a little bit of stage magic, piercing of the skin with 14-inch needles, a power-tool act and a little burlesque.

"We try to make it funny, sexy and scary, all with 20 acts," Blood said.

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Posted: March 13, 2008