FUSE TV - Amanda Palmer Celebrates Her Million-Dollar Booty With Pirate Cabaret

Thursday night (May 31) in a parking lot behind a furniture store in Brooklyn, Amanda Palmer threw a free party/cabaret to celebrate the one million dollars she received in fan donations on Kickstarter.com to record her next album—a previously unthinkably feat for a label-less artist. Oh, and don't forget that it took her less than a month and her target goal was only $100,000.

Palmer presided over her carnivalesque cabaret with her usual mix of punkish spontaneity and exacting control. She was surrounded by ecstatic fans, her band, author husband Neil Gaiman, people dressed like pirates, a fashion designer, a porn star friend (Stoya, who formerly dated Marilyn Manson) and a webcam which live streamed the whole fete for fans at home to watch.

She briefly serenaded the crowd with her trusty ukulele, then spent the next six hours emceeing the event. She introduced the entire cast of her cabaret to the crowd, from an organ player to magicians, a belly dancer to fire twirlers, whose short performances punctuated the focal point of the bash, which was an on-camera tribute to every one of the 24,883 people who donated to Palmer's Kickstarter fund.

Inside a makeshift structure built from rusty pipes and see-through plastic film (it resembled a human aquarium—check it out below), Palmer and co. gathered stacks of telephone books with the name of every donor written out on each Yellow Page. While songs like Iggy Pop's "Lust For Life" and the Beatles' "Money (That's What I Want)" blared in the background, Palmer, her band and a group of volunteers tore out the pages and plastered the donors' names on the static-y plastic for the ever-present webcam to capture. 

By the end of the night, the bubble/aquarium was so full of crumpled Yellow Pages that two kids successfully played hide-and-seek in the pile of donor names. Which was adorable.