April Fool: The 22 Things About Seattle That We WISH Were a Joke

Mon., Sep 24 2012 at 12:00AM

While it's customary to serve up hoax stories around April Fool's Day, we find ourselves more amazed at what ISN'T a joke in Seattle these days. Hence: our second annual list of things that we wish were jokes, but aren't.

4. EVERY WOMAN WHO ISN'T A YOGA TEACHER IS NOW A BURLESQUE DANCER Hasn't this revival gone on long enough? Yes, there are a handful of geniuses out there (male and female), but for every Indigo Blue and Cherry Manhattan, there's a seemingly unending line of chubby young (and no-longer-so-young) women who can't dance yet insist on empowering themselves onstage by strutting about waving taffeta in front of their pasties. It's like a horrible Smith College seminar under floodlights. We're all for public nudity, but a be-rouged suburbanite with a muffin top and questionable taste in lingerie is a sight best savored in a bedroom by candlelight, not in a performance venue. It's no surprise that after the first 15 minutes or so, people turn away and just talk over their drinks, as if the bump-and-grind a few feet away were a violinist playing That's Amore in a kitschy Italian restaurant. The show is about as sexy as a figure-drawing class, and after an hour or two you start to hope something inappropriate might actually happen. But nothing ever does.

3. THE MAN WHO LEFT SEATTLE COMPLETELY OVERRUN WITH DRUG DEALERS IS NOW THE NATION'S DRUG CZAR You might have noticed that there's a bit of a drug problem in downtown Seattle. In fact, it's gotten so bad that the city's business establishment is pushing a new initiative to crack down on street disorder. At a public safety forum last month, the head of the the Downtown Seattle Association admitted that the area's just not feeling as safe as it used to. Most Seattleites would probably agree. Good to know, then, that the man who spent the past decade overseeing our streets as head of the Seattle Police Department has now been given a much larger canvas on which to work. Airlifted to Washington, D.C., last May by Barack Obama, Gil Kerlikowske is today busy enforcing the president's national drug-control policy. Which meansâ€”if experience is any guideâ€”that, in addition to a courtly doorman, there will soon be three crack dealers stationed at every Nordstrom entrance nationwide.