EVERY TRICK IS ALSO A TREAT AT SATANIC BAY AREA’S HELL-O-WEEN BENEFIT SHOW

 

With the jack o’lanterns burnt out and the stores stripped of precious candy corn, another Halloween is in the books. And for your #UnHolyButWholesome Bay Area Satanists that means another hit benefit show in the hallowed Halloween records, as our HELL-O-WEEN Black Mass and Satanic variety show played to a rabid house at PianoFight on October 26.

HELL-O-WEEN was a benefit raising money for the Rainbow LGBTQ Community Center of Contra Costa County, a seven-act, freeform, DIY festival of excess and success in the devil’s name.

This was SBA’s second live show at PianoFight (after the sold-out sensation of last year’s Anti-Christ(mas), and with a crowd of 70-strong it was our most well-attended Satanic ritual to date.

For those without a sufficient alibi to join us, here’s a breakdown of how everything broke down:

  • For our opening heresy, SBA’s own Jane Thomas and cast performed a Satanic Halloween pageant about the true story of the Garden of Eden, complete with avocado toast, radical bodily autonomy, an almost fateful banana peel, and all of the other juicy bits they don’t teach you in Sunday School.
  • Primed with the fruits of knowledge from the first act, our house reptile expert Lava Naga gave the audience an up-close encounter with some real serpents, including a prized python of truly dramatic proportions.
  • To keep the crowd hot, Nudie Newbie’s winner Rosa Robada gave us live burlesque onstage, proving possibly even more flexible than the snakes.
  • Our own four-piece band Satan Club–in their very first live performance anywhere, anytime–stopped the show with a four-song set, including “Lies of the Father,” an original song performed to the tune of “Eye of the Tiger.”
  • We were very honored to welcome members of the radical art collective La Pocha Nostra to the stage, with Guillermo Gomez Pena performing his spoken word piece A Declaration of Poetic Disobedience while Balitronica Gomez washed the feet of audience members with the American flag.
  • In the first of two Satanic rituals that night (although arguably all creative performances are Satanic to some degree, and certainly the previous acts all were), our own Brigid Breed performed a mass Unbaptism of the audience, freely adapting the Unbaptism ritual originally conceived by the Satanic Temple’s Seattle Chapter.
  • And finally, we closed the evening with a new Black Mass composed and performed by by Tabitha Slander and Daniel Walker, exploring the theme of liberation, including our annual ritual “blessing” of Halloween candy in place of communion and recitation of the Apostate’s Creed.

 

In addition to a great opportunity to raise money for the Rainbow Center, HELL-O-WEEN was a Satanic celebration of freedom in all its forms: personal freedom, artistic freedom, creative freedom, sexual freedom, and freedom of speech and religion.

In folk tradition, Halloween is a night for breaking barriers and subverting the standard order. All of our HELL-O-WEEN performers and audience members broke barriers in the name of the most Satanic of all values: our power to create our own identities through radical acts.

HELL-O-WEEN comes but once a year, but every day is a treat when we remember to live deliciously.

 

Our altar greeted guests as they arrived.

Facetime with our serpentine collaborators.

Rosa Robada burlesque.

Satan Club

La Pocha Nostra

The Unbaptism.

Black Mass. (Sadie, pregnant but still on bell ringing duty, takes a seat at left.)