Full Body Glam With Benefits

Talk about the naked truth. Nonny Price, her petite, nearly nude body covered in neon pink makeup, is in need of a tiny, dime-sized Band-Aid--her third in the last couple of hours. “It just won’t stay on,” she announces about the uncooperative cover-up for what she describes as “my temperamental left breast.”

But this is no girlie show Price is preparing for backstage at the Universal Amphitheatre as body painters apply black swirls onto the G-string-clad masterpiece before them.

She and 11 other nearly nude dancers--half of them men, all doused in rainbow-bright colors and wearing barely there thongs (the law requires them to wear something)--then hit the stage as the warmup act for Elton John’s “The Concert: 20 Years With AIDS” Wednesday night.

For more than an hour, the kaleidoscope-painted dancers gyrated atop lighted drums in a preconcert show called Naked Spin, a fusion of deejay culture and body art, a concept created by MAC cosmetics. The company and its president, John Demsey, were honored at the event for their work with the MAC AIDS Fund. Established in 1994, the fund has raised more than $23 million from sales of the $14 lipstick Viva Glam.

For Demsey, the evening’s benefit for the Elton John AIDS Foundation and AIDS Project Los Angeles capped two months of national recognition for MAC and its work in the fight against AIDS. In November, the New York-based company was honored with a corporate citizen’s award from the Doctors of the World organization and a corporate humanitarian award from L.A.’s Project Angel Food.

As the Naked Spin portion of the program enthralled concertgoers filing into the theater, no one was more amazed about the artistic dancers--who spent five hours getting painted and later three hours removing the paint--than Demsey, who thanked his team of 14 MAC makeup artists and eight stylists from Vidal Sassoon Beverly Hills.

From head to toe, including inside ears and armpits, bodies became living Stephen Sprouse canvases as makeup artists--also on stage with the dancers--continued to blend colors and create leopard spots, stripes, starbursts and other graffiti designs onto every inch of fat-free skin.

The works in progress captivated many onlookers, including Gloria Amador, 41, recently divorced and ready to party.

“I feel like going up there and stuffing a dollar bill inside that golden boy’s G-string,” she said, referring to lean dancing machine Gabriel Ramirez, 22, painted in bright yellow with red splashes. But, just as quickly, Amador lost her nerve. “Better not; I’m old enough to be his mother.”

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Pop Music Review

Elton John leads the celebration of human resilience. F2