I arch a brow at Ming, who rolls her eyes. “It could have been the guys in the band, or Jane-” “The boys have more creative words for ‘penis,’ ” Andrea counters. “Why are you grilling us about this?” Ginn props her chin in her hands, elbows on the ground between her legs. It’s beneath you.” Ming’s brows shoot up, and I choke back a laugh at the suggestion she’s above anything, let alone a dirty Mad Lib. “I don’t care what you get into while you’re down here, but don’t bring the juvenile humor upstairs. She releases the page, letting it drift to the surface of the low file cabinet beside her.

As the general manager of a venue with a burlesque show, Andrea deals with this degree of raunch on a near-nightly basis. Still, I keep quiet, trying to feel her out. I argued she should have diversified, but now I’m not sure Andrea’s lilting West Midlands accent gave the piece an almost musical quality, even with the substitution. She filled in every noun with the word “penis,” inspiring a debate about whether the repetition was funny or if she’d drained the novelty from the word. Ming did the Mad Libs last weekend, when I brought in the pad to play with between shows. I shift side to side, the weave of my fishnets pressing into the ball of one foot, then the other. With her severe black bob and alabaster skin, she looks like a cartoon villain even when she’s smiling her current expression has me wondering which of us she plans to turn into a coat. “Dare I ask how this ended up on table two?” Andrea’s narrowed eyes land on me, and her lips flatten to a matte red line.

Ming sits at a makeup station, feigning innocence, a row of false eyelashes dangling from her fingers like a cigarette. The Twins carry on with their stretches on the far side of the dressing room, Ginn slouching and bored in a front split, Tonic doing her best to look shocked as she holds cobra pose. She lowers her reading glasses to hang from the gold chain at her neck, eyes shifting to study each of us in turn. A Mad Libs sheet hangs limply between the tips of her thumb and forefinger, the page held away from her, as though to keep the vulgarity she so thoughtfully “redacted” from staining her white blouse. “It is a redacted universally acknowledged, that a throbbing redacted in possession of a thick redacted must be in want of a redacted.” Andrea bites out each “redacted” with a distaste that grows more resigned with every repetition, the final utterance leaving her on little more than a throaty British sigh.

A Certain Appeal by Vanessa King