Squirm, giggle and goss at new show for women

By JULIE MIDDLETON

So this is what women want. A public Botox-ing, free champagne, win-a-bra competitions and some juicy gossip - the famous-for-being-famous Charlotte Dawson on her break-up with former All Black Mark Robinson.

Welcome to the Lipstick Lounge, an evening offering "inspiration" for women, launched by beauty queen-turned TV personality Lana Coc-Kroft at Auckland bar Float on Thursday.

Inspiration? To spend. It's one slicker-than-usual infomercial. From couches on a raised stage, microphones in hand, Coc-Kroft, 35, and sidekick Nicki Sunderland, 30, former partners on ZM radio show Lipstick Lunch, direct a dizzying promotion of sponsors' products, upbeat music videos, a show of top-end fashion (discounts available if you buy tonight!) and the incessant chatter of 500 mostly young women just released from work.

The sharp girls have a glass of champagne in each hand; what Coc-Kroft calls "test driving a new concept" is free tonight, but next week tickets will cost $15.

But Coc-Kroft and co must feel like the in-house pub band that never gets on top of people's chattering. It takes something with a high squirm factor to silence them.

Hands fly to mouths and the squeamish cringe as 36-year-old Lisa Matson - a business associate of wrinkle-removing doctor Catherine Stone, not an audience volunteer - submits to two muscle-paralysing Botox injections, one above each eyebrow.

It's most disconcerting watching someone lying on a fold-out bed on a brightly lit stage having needles stuck into her face while Stone - 25, tight cocktail dress, stiletto heels - has a microphone stuck in hers so she can keep on talking.

Stone, whose little demo takes all of four minutes, later admits to some qualms about the exercise: she was told to expect "a small seminar".

No such qualms for the women who respond to the call: "Who wants to win a new bra?" and find, once stuck on stage, that the winner is the first to extract hers from under her top.

It's a remarkably flesh-free exercise, accompanied by hoots of laughter. Pairs of friends arriving on stage discover, too late, that their task is to take each other's bras off.

The noise level is rising by the time Charlotte Dawson, 36, arrives, talking about her split with Mark Robinson ("he broke the relationship up") and the documentary recording her search for her birth parents ("really emotional and quite sad").

The chattering masses also hear ex-pop star Carly Binding sing, and there's a promise of eligible bachelors every week. "We're going to bring you nice boys," pledges Coc-Kroft, "because there's nothing nicer than nice boys."

Not all are seduced: "This is advertising crap!" snorts a departing teacher.

After the 90-minute show, Coc-Kroft denies that it's anything of the sort, but torpedoes her own argument by repeatedly calling the crowd "customers".

One of those customers wears a T-shirt with the words "kia kaha nga titties o te whenua", a piece of bilingual buffoonery that translates as "all power to the titties of the land". Sums up the ethos of the whole evening, really - especially if you're selling something.