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On an autumn night at the Southeast Powell Boulevard honky-tonk The Showdown, the 6 pm slot went to Casey Neill & the Norway Rats, featuring such celebrated Portland players as Jenny Conlee-Drizos, Rachel Blumberg, the ubiquitous Scott McCaughey, and Victor Krummenacher.
But the late show was equally star-studded. It was Madam Cooper’s Country Cabaret, a night of twangy classics, burlesque dancers and working strippers. The frontwoman’s band, Cooper and Her Daddy Issues, shared the stage with Sinferno greats Pistolita LaMuerta (performing for the first time in nine years) and Abigail Rhys, Stag stripper Cowboy, and a surprise appearance by Pink Martini’s Thomas Lauderdale and Hunter Noack, battering a side-stage piano on Cooper’s cover of “9 to 5.” Since then, Storm Large and Poison Waters have taken the stage; Lauderdale and Noack are regular performers. Audience members were reminded that they can take pictures and video during the music-only portions, but when the boobs or butts come out, cameras are forbidden, and generous showers of dollar bills encouraged.
A product of Sinferno herself, Cooper started the Country Cabaret in Nashville, where she spent more than a decade. But the Madame is also both as Oregon and as country as they come; she grew up on a cattle ranch near the South Coast, was a child mutton-busting champion and later a rodeo clown. In the early aughts, she was a regular at Mary’s Club, but never danced herself, fearing it would hurt her musical career.
“I wanted to be on the Grand Ole Opry,” says the performer-cum-entrepreneur, who prefers to simply be referred to as Madame Cooper. “Country music would not accept me if I was a stripper. And then I went and did the country music thing and realized they weren’t going to accept me anyway because I’m a woman with an opinion. Then I was like, fuck it, why don’t I do what I always wanted to do?”
After COVID hit, she came back to town, worked at Mary’s and saved her money. As of a Feb. 4 soft opening, Cooper has her own spot: Madame Cooper’s Parlor, in the former Valentine’s space on Ankeny Alley. It’s part cocktail bar, part music venue, and part strip club (with all of the performers being working strippers, not just burlesque entertainers). There’s even a peep-show-like space, the “music box.”
She is excited to join the likes of Mary’s, Dante’s, Can Can’s Paris Theatre, and Voodoo Doughnut in a new “pink light district,” and is also planning burlesque and strip club history walking tours (in costume, of course).
“I love being back home in Oregon, where we have our constitutional right to be naked and to express our First Amendment rights in a powerful way,” she says. “I constantly am talking about sex workers and the working class. I like to bring political issues up, throw some cowboy boots and rhinestones on them, pop some titty out, and give a wink and a smile.”
