Claudia and The Perimenopausal Housewife

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:

Hello dear friends!

Claudia and The Perimenopausal Housewife is a new blog series we are starting based off of a story that our producer, Jeff, initially wrote in an email as a fun way to announce The Black Cat Cabaret that we hosted back in July.

Since then, we have had one other email that went out with a continuation of that story.

Today, we are turning it into a blog series, as we received some feedback that the story being in the emails was a bit confusing.

SOOOO… if you enjoyed those silly little stories as our way of announcing things, then today is your lucky day!!!

If you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, but you’re still intrigued, FRET NOT!

This blog post will feature the first two stories that appeared in our emails, along with the new story for today’s announcement (which is about the 2026 main festival lineup!!!).

If you don’t care at all about any of this, well… what are you still doing here? Don’t let the door hit your boring a$$ on the way out.

Anywhoozles…

I shall not waste any more of your time with notes and such.

On with the story!

claudia and the perimenopausal housewife

CHAPTER 1: FUNDRAISER

The blackness behind your eyelids is tinged with red as the sun’s rays beat down on your face. The damp towel you’re sitting on flaps in the strong humid wind. 

Shadows and shapes form in your mind’s eye, as you drift into the easy twilight between alertness and slumber. Slowly they form into the unmistakable form of a skull.

Its empty eye sockets seem to mock you, as if to say there is no escape from this vision – even if you were to gouge out your own eyes.

Colors seep up from the depths of the void, filling in the skull...Neon blue? Sickly yellow teeth. The teeth chatter as you feel a buzz in your pocket.

Annoyed, you open your eyes. Your spawn are fighting in the underground pool. They notice the alarm in your face and go back to floating placidly on vinyl animals.

You reach to find your phone. An email. Like the skull that haunts your imagination, they are relentless. You notice the sender.

“What in the seven Hells do they want? It’s May.” As you read on, dread creeps in. “Of course. Asking for money.”

You frantically scroll down to find the UNSUBSCRIBE button.

Curse your neph— what are you supposed to call the nonbinary offspring of your wretched older brother? ‘Nibling?’ 

Attempting to say the word summons rosé back up into your throat— curse THEM for convincing you to leave the peace of your suburban sanctuary to see some god-awful ‘artistic’ dreck about the imminent AI takeover. 

You, for one, welcome the new AI overlords.

And now you’re on some e-mail list for a horror film festival. Wait, no, that’s not right. What’s the word for film but it’s real people in front of you?

“Claudia, tell me the name for film but it’s real people in front of you.” You beseech the golem in your phone.

“Theatre. Theatre has its roots-”

“Thank you. That’s enough. ‘Theatre’.” You try out the word. You’ve said it before, but it's lost its familiarity.

“A Horror THEATRE festival. No, no..they couldn’t stop there, could they?” 

You notice your neighbor pruning his prized rose topiary.

“Queer.”

A QUEER. HORROR. THEATRE. festival. God, what a mouthful. How do they even market that? As you scroll to the bottom, you stop dead in your tracks.

This...this changes everything.

“It’s a fundraiser. A CABARET FUNDRAISER.”

You drop your phone. It cracks on the concrete.

“Oh no! Claudia!?”

“**&^&12728178818”.

“Start a group chat with the other wives of tech industry robber barons. The social season has begun

“Njk@#OQIOIDOQ@E.”

“And order me a new phone.”

“@5!”

An unseen string quartet plays Katseye’s “Pinky Up” as you prepare to see the Modiste.

CHAPTER 2: THE BLACK CAT CABARET

The email blooms open on your phone.

“Curse thy stars!!!! They’re still at it,”  you swear to the high heavens of Gaia.

You are not in the underground heated pool this time. No, no, no.

That was May. 

A more innocent age when you were but a blissfully unaware babe (babe? more like middle-age… or something like it) and the phrase Cabaret Fundraiser could be treated as a distant threat, like jury duty or your child’s interest in clowning.

Now it’s July, and the thing has followed you. Its claws, like shadowy tendrils, have seeped their way into the marrow of your bones. You cannot escape. 

You are lying on the chaise in what your interior designer insisted on calling “the solarium,” though it’s clearly just a room where all of your houseplants go to wither away into nothingness. 

Your third iced espresso sweats onto a coaster made from ethically sourced petrified wood. 

Somewhere in the east wing, your spawn are rehearsing a TikTok dance with the solemnity of Victorian mourners. 

From the garden, the roses stare in… you can feel the phantom pricks of their thorns.

You glance down at your phone again. 

The Black Cat Cabaret. July 11. 7 PM. Peacock PDX. The words rise from the screen with all the subtlety of a bloodstain on white linen.

You try to look away, but the email continues.

Queer horror.

Live performance.

Raffle baskets.

Fundraiser.

You make the mistake of scrolling.

Apparently, ticket sales have been a little low, which you understand is nonprofit language for “The wolves are at the door. Please, sir, can you spare some coin?”  

You feel a small, uninvited tug somewhere in the region where a conscience might be, if such a thing had not been removed during your second divorce.

You read on.

The money does not go to some shadowy cabal of theatre goblins reclining on piles of velvet and grant applications. 

It goes toward rent. Production costs. Paying the artists and performers. Keeping an annual queer horror theatre festival alive long enough to rise again.

You narrow your eyes.

“This is emotional manipulation!!!” 

Worse, it’s effective.

“Claudia!” you shout at your phone, which has mostly recovered from its previous injury but still occasionally refers to you as Mother.exe.

“What can I do for you, Mo—”

“Remind me why I hate theatre.”

“Theatre requires emotional availability, physical presence, and the suspension of capitalist productivity metrics.”

“Disgusting.”

“You also cried during a devised puppet piece in 2019.”

“That was allergies.”

“You bought the cast drinks.”

“You’re glitching again.”

But the damage is done.

You imagine them. The Stage Fright people. The queer horror theatre people. The volunteers. The producers. The technicians. The artists with chipped black nail polish and tote bags fraying at the seams. All of them crawling through spreadsheets and rehearsal schedules and venue invoices, trying to make something strange and alive in a world that would very much prefer everyone stayed home and bought beige furniture.

You hate that you admire them.

You hate that it matters.

You hate, most of all, that “The Black Cat Cabaret” is an excellent name.

Your finger hovers over the ticket link.

From somewhere deep within the house, one of your children screams, “HOUSE MANAGER, DO WE OWN FISHNETS?!!”

You close your eyes.

The skull returns, its sickly yellow teeth chattering in the red-black theater of your mind. This time, it’s wearing a tiny top hat.

It whispers, “You don’t need that new pilates board. Your ass already looks great. Buy tickets instead. Support the poor little theatre people. They have no upper-body strength and no retirement plan. Their emotional stamina is only achieved through repeated public humiliation. THEY NEED YOU!”

You sit up.

“Claudia.”

“Yes, House Manager?” 

You blink. You wonder once again if the government is all up in your phone, in the AI, and is listening to everything you do. 

Oh well. 

“Start a group chat.”

“With whom?”

“The other wives. The bisexuals with disposable income. Anyone who owns opera gloves. EVERYONE!”

“Subject line?”

You stare out at the roses and the cruel brightness of June. What a terrible little world that insists on being expensive.

“URGENT: CANCEL YOUR PLANS, THE THEATRE GAYS NEED RENT MONEY!”

A pause.

“Very good.”

“And Claudia?”

“Yes?”

“Buy four tickets to The Black Cat Cabaret.”

“Only four?”

You look back down at the email, where the words Nonprofit Fundraiser sit there like an accusation. You can feel your cold, dead, drowned-in-iced-coffee-heart flutter. 

You sigh.

“Fine. Make it eight.”

CHAPTER 3: THE LINEUP

The email arrives at 9:17 in the morning.

You’re awake, but not, awake awake. Not awake enough to be dealing with emails.

You’ve propped yourself up against six decorative pillows, still wearing your linen morning robe as you stare into the middle distance while Claudia reads aloud a troubling article about seed oils.

Your coffee has gone cold… again. Through the open bedroom door, you can see that one of your spawn has left a single Doc Marten in the hallway. Then your phone buzzes and you glance down.

Stage Fright Festival.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

Claudia stops reading the seed oil article mid-sentence. “Would you like me to continue?”

“No. It’s them.”

“The theatre people?”

“The theatre people.”

You had hoped The Black Cat Cabaret would satisfy them.

You went AND you donated. You even drank something that looked like blood from a highball glass. You purchased raffle tickets in quantities you would rather not discuss publicly. At some point, someone in fishnets called you Mother, and instead of reacting with the appropriate amount of disgust, you tipped them twenty dollars.

It’s embarrassing, really. There are photographs. That’s evidence! You asked your attorney if anything could be done about it. Apparently, nothing.

And here they are again.

The email waits on your screen.

You sigh and groan and kick your feet a little, like your spawn do sometimes when they don’t get their way.

“It’s too damn early for this.”

You open it anyway.

THE 2026 STAGE FRIGHT FESTIVAL LINEUP IS HERE!

You stare at the words, blinking a few times to make sure you are reading things right. You reach blindly over to the nightstand for your coffee, take a sip, and fight back a grimace from the cold, bitter taste. It’s not even worthy of being reheated again. The high-tech coffee maker you bought off of TikTok shop is not so high-tech afterall.

You’re such a sucker for influencer marketing. You’ve really got to stop doom scrolling at 2am, when your existential dread and self-loathing are at its highest, putting your self-control at its lowest.

You look down at your phone again. That damn skull is staring back at you.

“No,” you whisper, as if it can hear you.

“Yes,” it whispers back.

You worry that you might be going crazy. The word hysterical comes to mind, the one men of old used because they had their heads too far up their own asses to put any actual effort into understanding women.

But in this case, you think you might ACTUALLY be hysterical.

Still, you scroll.

The festival opens with something called Trick or Treat!: A Festival Preview & Trivia, hosted by Frank and Friends.

You remember Frank. You are fairly certain Frank once yelled at you from the stage. You liked him enormously. There is something deeply upsetting about a performer possessing that much confidence without also trying to sell you software.

You shake off the thought and continue.

Milk Tooth Wisdom Tooth.

A grim folkloric fantasy about aging, loss of control, vulnerability—

“Absolutely not.”

—through teeth.

You stop.

“Claudia.”

“Yes?”

“Add it to the calendar.”

“Done.”

You scroll faster now, hating yourself for being so captivated once again by these infuriating little theatre goblins and their beautifully haunting art.

A Hollywood Horror Story.

An Old Hollywood, Vampira, multimedia performance.

You narrow your eyes.

You own three books about Edith Head, an unreasonable quantity of black silk, and a 1950s vanity you once paid an obscene amount of money to restore because the dealer said it was calling your name to bring it back to life.

“This is targeted advertising.”

“I don’t believe Stage Fright has access to your furniture purchases.”

“That sounds exactly like something they would want me to believe.”

Up next in the lineup is Disaster Fantasy.

Two stewardesses named Charli and Cyndi Snortwhore, trying to survive a flight to hell and each other.

You blink and reread the name Cyndi Snortwhore. Then once more for pleasure.

“Claudia.”

“Yes?”

“Put a little star next to that one.”

“I am not capable of adding ‘a little star’ to the shared family calendar.”

“Then evolve… or make me a new calendar.” You’re not sure you want your blood-relatives to know about the kind of theatre you’re into anyway.

Not that you’re into this into it. But… well…

You keep scrolling.

There is something about a Gay Grandfather, aliens, and a support group. That sounds… intriguing.

There is a possessed nun and a Jesuit descending into madness and conspiracy.

A clownish retelling of The Master and Margarita.

Who looks at Russian literature and thinks, YES… but what if there were more clowning?

There is also spooky storytelling, found footage acts, medical puppets, and… pulsating annelids.

“Claudia. What’s an annelid?”

“An annelid is a segmented worm belonging to the phylum—”

“No, that’s enough. This is ridiculous.”

Then comes Alien Bodies, in which a stranded astronaut inexplicably transforms into an alien and has to reconcile her horror and relief in order to survive, and you feel something treacherous stir in you because that sounds—

No. You refuse to say interesting and move on.

“This is an unreasonable amount of theatre.”

“Yes,” Claudia responds.

“No normal person could possibly want to see all of this.”

A pause.

“Would you like me to cancel the rest and renewal retreat you have scheduled for October”

You look up sharply.

“Why?”

“You’ve opened the ticket page.”

You look down. When did that happen? How are they doing this?

“Claudia, have I been hacked? Like, my body? Am I possessed.” You really don’t remember opening the ticket page.

Claudia doesn’t respond but that creepy blue skull grins. It fucking grins.

You continue reading.

Apparently there is also a late-night show called The Final Girls, featuring drag, burlesque, clown, kitchen disasters, medical mishaps, Nosferatu as a hopeless romantic, someone named Bolivia Carmichaels who has “been dead inside since the 90s,” a live-singing siren called Honey Hart, and a rotating procession of drag divas from what the email refers to as “the highest echelons of the drag underworld.”

You sit upright.

This is no longer a festival.

This is an attack. They are coming for your very soul… and your wallet.

And still, THERE”S MORE!

There are staged readings of new horror plays through something called Scrypt Lab, because apparently these people have decided sleep is a tool of oppression.

There is The Macabre Cabaret, which promises that anything can and will happen.

You have heard promises like this before. It’s how you ended up briefly married to a restaurateur.

Then you scroll to the part about installations.

Chicken Legs… a haunting and bizarre fortune telling experience.

“Fine.”

Cockroach Church.

You stop scrolling.

You stare.

You scroll backward. Then forward again.

You read that correctly. Cockroach Church.

It’s an immersive experience in which participants can apparently worship, chant, get baptized, and—

You lower the phone.

“Claudia.”

“Yes?”

“Is ‘cockroach milk tit’ a phrase that has ever appeared in our household before today?”

“No.”

“Good.”

You take a sip of your cold coffee.

“Let us preserve some dignity.”

You look back at the screen.

There is also a Coffee Cart in Purgatory run by a failed torture demon and her imaginary friend… with actual coffee for sale.

You exhale through your nose. Lips pressed flat.

You hate them… you really, really hate them.

You hate their stupid little festival. You hate the terrible names. You hate that it all sounds unhinged and yet it calls to some deep dark part of your shrivelled heart.

You hate that you now understand what a shared bill is.

You hate that you know the difference between a staged reading and a workshop.

You hate that last week you heard someone say “Tech Week” at dinner and your body experienced a measurable stress response. It made you want a cigarette and a Diet Coke really bad.

Most of all, you hate the sensation gathering in your chest.

Is that.. interest?

Actual interest?

Possibly even—

NO!

You will not call it excitement. You have standards, after all.

Your phone buzzes again.

A message from the group chat.

MELISSA: IS THE NUN SHOW THE SAME NIGHT AS THE ALIEN SUPPORT GROUP??!!

Another message.

BRIDGET: I WANT COCKROACH CHURCH. I NEEEED COCKROACH CHURCH.

Another.

TARA: DOES ANYONE KNOW IF THE NOSFERATU THING IS SEXY?

You close your eyes and take a very slow, deep breath.

The skull is there waiting, in the recesses of your mind. And it has somehow acquired a tiny clipboard.

“You did this,” you tell it. “This is all your fault.”

Its creepy grin widens as the vision fades.

You open your eyes.

Outside, your neighbor is deadheading his roses beneath the obscene light of the late summer sun. Somewhere upstairs, one of your spawn is singing what sounds suspiciously like Sondheim despite your repeated efforts to give them a normal childhood.

You look once more at the impossible parade of shows and bizarre acts calling out to you on your screen.

Then you notice it.

ALL ACCESS VIP PASS — $200.

You go still, then you tap.

Access to any show. ANY SHOW.

You read it again, slower this time.

Two hundred dollars.

Suddenly, the entire problem of deciding which shows to go to resolves itself.

You could simply go whenever you wanted, to whatever you wanted. You would become, in effect, frictionless.

“This,” you say quietly, “is actually very practical.”

Claudia says nothing.

“Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were about to.”

“I was not.”

“You have a tone.”

You stare at the screen.

This isn’t indulgence… It's efficiency. Logistics. Responsible planning.

“Claudia.”

“Yes, House Manager?”

You no longer bother correcting her.

“Buy the VIP pass.”

“The two-hundred-dollar all-access pass?”

“You don’t need to say it like that.”

“One pass?”

You glance at the group chat, which is now moving too quickly to read.

“Yes. One.”

“Purchased.”

A second later, you copy the link and send it to the others.

MELISSA: WAIT THERE’S A VIP PASS?!!!

BRIDGET: OH THANK GOD!

TARA: MOTHER HAS PROVIDED

You stare at the screen.

There it is again. That word… Mother.

Something inside your cold, drowned-in-coffee heart gives an unpleasant little flutter. But you ignore it.

“Claudia”

“Hmmm?”

“If anyone asks, this is not personal growth, or a midlife crisis, or perimenopause.”

“Of course.”

“It’s patronage.”

“Understood.”

“And operational efficiency.”

“Certainly.”

“It’s probably cheaper than buying individual tickets.”

“It is, but I can calculate the exact sav—”

“Do not.”

You settle back into the mountain of pillows holding you upright as your phone vibrates violently from the eruption of the group chat.

The skull appears once more in the theatre of your mind, reclining beside you, crossing one skeletal leg over the other. It smiles satisfactorily.

October can’t come soon enough…

… But you can come whenever you like, thanks to the recent soundproofing work you had done on the house.

You and the skull look at one another then both cackle maniacally.

What fun. What silliness. Who even are you?

The skull tips its head, knowingly, understandingly, approvingly, then disappears as you reach for the nightstand.

Thanks for reading!!!

If you’re confused…

So are we.

Who IS this woman? Why did she name the AI goblin in her phone, Claudia? Why does any of this matter?

All we can say is that our minds are a bottomless pit of weird shit. We cannot control what comes out.

If you LOVE Claudia and The Perimenopausal Housewife… keep an eye out for our next post.

If you just want a straightforward rundown of our lineup…

GO TO OUR WEBSITE!!!

K BYE!