By Bliss
‘Deck the halls with luscious ladies, falalalala…’ 
   That's how the venerable carol might as well go at Saturday's Second  Occasional  Victorian Christmas celebration at John Bull Pub. Forget the teddibly proper gentility and tea, - the only sugarplums you might encounter at this soiree would come gilded in paint and pantaloons with, um… heaving bosoms.
  The event is a benefit performance, with proceeds being donated to the City of Hope Pediatric Cancer Center and the American Cancer Society. 
   Leading the festivities with drained ale tankards and rousing good cheer will be the Sons of Anacreon, a 2-year-old: troupe of actors and comedians who have worked extensively at the Renaissance and Dickens Christmas fairs. They prefer bawds to ballads. 
   “It’s a group of guys singing Victorian drinking songs,” explains founder Patrick Franz, who modeled the group after one he had sung with in the San Francisco area called Hard Times, “We’re basically comedians who sing. We crack a lot of jokes during and between songs, and the choruses - most of them - are sing-alongs. The audiences join in and generally wind up raising the roof." 
   The original Anacreon, after whom this Cockney-accented band of merrymakers named themselves, was an ancient Greek poet. 
   “Only bits and pieces are left of his poetry,” says Franz, "but they’re definitely about wine and women. In Victorian times, they dug out his poetry, and decided this was the kind of guy that gentlemen’s clubs were made for. So they wrote songs praising him. We thought it was really neat to regroup the Sons of Anacreon after 100 years and basically be a gentlemen's club dedicated to wit harmony and the god of wine- although for us it tends to be more beer.” 
   The plaid-clad lads (Franz, Damien Elwood, Jonathon Graff, Michael Norris and David Springhorn) are definitely not family-hour entertainment, even though Franz says they'd only earn a PC rating: “We never come out and say anything [profane], but boy, do we allude to a lot!” 
   The a cappella group has a regular gig at Q’s Riverbottom in Burbank, across the street from Warner Brothers, They've performed several times at the John Bull Pub. The Saturday night show will be similar to their 1996 Christmas benefit there. 
   "We'll probably have about an hour on the stage, and then we have many different acts coming on,” Franz says. “We have some soiled doves doing their version of ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.' We’ll have a can-can dance. We'll have a number of people taking solos and singing in the old music hall tradition. It’s very much like vaudeville was. The Sons will close the show, and we’ll all wind up singing Christmas carols.” 
 

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