Well, you have all been waiting a year for one of Milwaukee's most infamous art happenings to roll around again. The Degenerative Arts Weekend is a three-day festival of art, music, fashion, debauchery and side show antics. This over-the-top annual event will fill your senses and blow your mind.

Friday and Saturday's events will be held at the Modjeska Theater (1134 W. Mitchell St.) and include bands from Milwaukee and Chicago, slide shows, film loops, a wearable sculpture fashion show, performing dogs, a naked fire dancer, a bed of nails performance and a guy on stilts!

Sunday's events will take place at Bliss (2609 N. Bremen) and will include the show "Meat" with works by Lucky Star, Bliss Studio, Feminists for Fornication, and other local carnivores. Then the party moves to Thai Joe's (2239 N. Prospect Ave.) for the Perforance Art Cavalcade, starting at 9 p.m. which will be followed by a performance by The Paragraphs at 10:30 p.m.

As a member of so many local arts groups like MARN (Milwaukee Artist Resource Network), process, VAM! and others, I was lucky to just track down George Sheppard, one of the organizers of the Degenerative Arts weekend. With the show just a few days away, we had to squeeze in our interview over lunch at Dancing Ganesha before George rushed off to be interviewed for another local publication.

OMC: So George, what all do you guys have planned for the Degenerative Arts Weekend this year?

Sheppard: It's a three-day festival to benefit the Milwaukee Artist Resource Network (MARN) and the Modjeska Theater Restoration Fund. The two major events for the weekend are the third annual Wearable Sculpture Fashion Show on Saturday night and the weekend kick-off on Friday night featuring the Frogs and four other bands.

OMC: So both of those events will take place at the Modjeska?

Sheppard: Yep.

OMC: What exactly do you have planned for the fashion show on Saturday night?

Sheppard: When the house and the bar open at 7:30 p.m., we'll be utilizing the entire theater. The lobbies will be turned into galleries. There'll be installations, film loops, paintings hung, sculptures, cocktail waiters and waitresses and all the while Jerry Grillo will be performing. Upstairs, DJ Navigator Green will be spinning for the fashion show just behind what we call the "Royal Circle."

OMC: What's the Royal Circle?

Sheppard: It's a limited number of seats we have set aside in the balcony. The main floor is where most of the action is gonna happen, and we want people to be on their feet and engaged, so we're taking out the first five rows of seats. That way people can gather up to the stage and near the runway. For people who don't want to be in that sort of atmosphere, we have reserved the first three rows of the balcony (known as the Royal Circle.) These seats will be available for a minimum $21 donation. People in these unobstructed seats can relax in their chairs and be served by their own personal cocktail stewards, while everyone else will be encouraged to stand and cheer down on the main floor.

OMC: Any hints of what we should expect to see?

Sheppard: The fashion show ranges anywhere from serious art to fine art, art for the body. There's things that are risky and sexy or odd or performance involved with them. I don't want to give away specific pieces, but there's an outline of the show. You never know what you're going to get either. When you're putting out the call for submissions, it's like I get this feeling in my gut, wondering if we are going to get any, but it's fun to just sit back and see what people are going to come up with. There are a lot of people that are interested.

Last year, we moved to a larger space and made it a three day event. There was a traveling freak show circus that came into town for a week and local bands played. That was a lot of fun. Saturday was the fashion show, Saturday afternoon was a little mini alternative film festival, Sunday afternoon there was a picnic and Sunday night The Paragraphs played. There was a dance party. We had all this stuff planned, and we didn't know if anyone was going to show up. The weird part about the fashion show is the amount of chaos because it is very last minute. Part of it is probably me (laugh), but part of it is probably that all these other people have paying jobs too. I have a full-time job helping run a restaurant and it is really time consuming to run this as well, and that is part of the dynamic of making it very last minute. The charm of the event was the fact that it was just a bunch of people getting together and having fun and not really having any goal or intention other than incorporating a bunch of different artworks into one night.