I have a colleague who likes to call people chickenspankers. He's a long, tall drink of agua and he'd put you in mind of what a refugee from a Fellini movie would have looked like if Fellini had been an American. Deep voice. Cracked grin. He cocks his head to one side, a look crosses his face that's somewhere between a smile and a leer (a smeer?) and he says "Boyyy...., he's a reee-al chickenspanker," wallowing in every syllable.

I suspect the Asylum Street Spankers would be proud to be called chickenspankers.

There seems to be no definite number of Asylum Street Spankers. It's somewhere around ten, give or take a standard error. True to their billing, they're all-acoustic, and unmiked. "We perform without the benefit of demon electricity" says Mysterious John, who is their spokespanker. Mysterious John has black and white patent-leather wingtips, a Hawaiian shirt and dark shades. He does a mean Ross Perot and a pretty good Richard Nixon. Like most Spankers (lead guitar, bass and brushed snare drum excluded) he's only on stage some of the time.

The music is old novelty numbers, vintage jazz and various originals that are quirky, funny and somewhere between salacious and flat-out obscene. (Do not take your maiden aunt to a Spankers' show.) The instruments vary from tune to tune, sometimes including harmonica, ukelele or washboard. They have a fine jazz clarinetist, one Stanley Smith, and the lead guitarist who was with them at Twist (missed his name; I gather he's new to the band) was a particularly spiffy stringspanker.

They're a motley lot, these Spankers. The fiddler, Eamon McLaughlin, is a fresh-faced lad from England. Josh Arnson, rhythm guitar and vocals, seems to have a Sons-of-the-Pioneers complex. Then there is a Meatloafish bad boy named Wammo who, as the web site says, has a strong personality and isn't afraid to use it. Christina Marrs, the one woman, might almost seem demure until she starts singing about the thing between her legs that could make a dead man... Anyway, you get the idea. (Actually, a good 75% of their material was G rated. But some of it definitely made it all the way to X.)

There was more or less no dancing; even the shuffle-shuffle of people's little feet makes for stiff competition with unamplified instruments. Marc had filled the place up with chairs, though every once in a while, one or two of us (well, two or four...) would trot a little fox back in the back. Most of the audience was pretty well-behaved, though there was one drunken customer who kept snapping her fingers with the music. Unfortunately, her sense of rhythm declined in direct proportion to the quantity of alcohol she swallowed.

All told, it was a crackerjack evening. And it's just the sort of thing that I'm really going to miss about Twist. Who else is going to bring in the Mollys or the Spankers or Don Walser (Jabba the Yodler, as I most fondly refer to him)? I'm already in withdrawal and the doors ain't closed yet.

-Allen Stairs