The Vulnerability Beneath Bridget Everett’s Raunchy Rock Bottom

To judge from the grainy videos on YouTube, Bette Midler’s shows at the Continental Baths in 1971 were not especially vulgar. She mostly stuck to double entendres and generic ribaldry. What does seem shocking, even now, is the venue, that orgy palace of men in white towels — and the common cause Midler made with them as fellow outsiders. Bridget Everett delivers something of the same shock in her tornadic and polymorphously perverse cabaret act Rock Bottom, even though the polarities are reversed. The venue — Joe’s Pub — is more salubrious now, but the vulgarity, even accounting for inflation, is far greater. It amounts to the same thing, though: a complicated and often brilliant love offering to the emotionally dispossessed. The character Everett has been honing in alt-cabaret land over the past decade is a handful, and not just because she’s a proudly big gal. Her main interests are sex and Chardonnay, and you sense that it’s the latter that has helped her embrace the former. “Embrace” is too mild a word for her sex-positivity, though: She’s a one-woman liberation movement for anyone with genitals. Shame is not in the tunestack. She introduces one number by saying, with approximately the same breezy intonation as Florence Henderson introducing a salute to the American flag, “Every show I do, I like to dedicate a song to everyone with a pussy.”