The Rubber Ball Weekend 2005
with added English Mansion visuals
The format of the infamous Skintwo Ball had been flagging in previous years and so this time around the event had a complete transformation at the knowledgeable hands of Mistress Absolute, who is also the tour de force behind the infinitely successful Club Subversion. There were three imperative changes – it was moved from its time-honoured 
but terribly anti-social Monday evening to a Saturday night, and was open much later from 10pm until 6am. The price was dropped considerably and the venue was changed. They moved to the SE1 club, a huge warehouse style venue under London Bridge, of course a more lavish venue with a large stage area would be preferable but I’m not sure there are many suitable venues, especially ones that would permit a fetish event and give up a Saturday. So all in all the SE1 club was a good compromise and once inside the crew had taken a huge amount of trouble to glam up the whole event. On entering the club you had to walk through a grope tube where hands pushed through a thin rubber lining to grope and caress you. Once inside the new venue was made up of lots of separate rooms letting you explore and wander through the differing environments.
Actually each area was organized by well-known scene clubs: Carwash with a 70’s rubber disco, The Lady Luck Club running a 50’s jive bar with live music, rave dance hall with fashion visuals, Chill out area and best of all and for the first time at a Skintwo Ball, a Dungeon/Playroom with fantastic kit. After an unsteady start, where everyone wasn’t exactly sure if playing was allowed – soon the sound of whips and cries of delight were drowning everything out. The central and pivotal anchor to the old Skintwo Balls were the innovative, alternative stage acts and fashion shows. With the change in venue these kind of shows were out of the question, but were replaced with pretty much continuous shows throughout the evening in each of the different areas. Many of the shows were little gems – I loved the flesh hook suspension performance and the Adora Girls with their fantastic burlesque dance routine.
The English Mansion provided over an hours worth of black and white, moody SM visuals, mainly edited down scenes from The English Mistress DVD Collection. These were projected up onto two huge screens over the dance floor and were hugely successful. I wore an all leather uniform, complete with a leather eye patch and spent much of the evening enjoying the playroom, dealing with a number of errant slaves. I had a fantastic evening and thought it was a great event.
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