Photos: The Goth, Blood-Drenched Baby Shower Of Your Nightmares (NSFW)

Baby showers tend to be pretty staid affairs. They are often sober daytime events full of soft pastels and ooohing and aaahing over all the new tiny toys and clothes presented to the new mom-to-be. Veteran moms—dads are rarely present—will weigh in with horror stories, but the chirpy tone of the typical baby shower tends to belie the messy realities of childbirth and child-rearing. Pasadena mom Kirsten Bosio calls them "a pretty band-aid to put on child birth."

So for her third baby shower, Bosio decided it was time to shake things up. Both she and her husband, who live in Pasadena, are the children of pastors. She laughs, "What could we do to piss everyone off? A Satanic theme!"

That's how Bosio came to plan a baby shower that involved topless burlesque dancing, cocktails served out of baby bottles, a cake crafted to look like a demonic baby crowning from a bloody vagina and a wrestling pit with gobs of fake blood that ended up everywhere.

"People are so uptight about kids and everything surrounding child birth," Bosio told LAist. "It's a relief to laugh about it."

Bosio, who says she's always been fascinated by religious iconography, dressed like a gothic, gray-haired Madonna. Partygoers beat a piñata created in her image. Her husband went as a priest, and her two daughters donned vaguely religious outfits with black veils. Though her 7-year-old did at one point strip down to her underwear to jump into the wrestling pit, Bosio blessed this move (as well as us publishing photos of her). Her only worry was that her daughter, who is trained in Tae Kwon Do, might go a little too hard on her opponents.

Guests entered the party held at Miracle Mile's All(most) Gallery through a curtain resembling a vulva that included a clit. Bosio planned the shower with the help of her "enablers" from the Loose Morals Craft Club.

They went all out. There were two comedians who performed sets revolving around pregnancy jokes. There were three burlesque dancers: a demon woman and then a woman who gives birth to an alien via C-section. The final act was a Carrie-themed number in which the dancer started out in a prom dress and ended up covered in blood. Attendees posed for photos in an adult-sized crib—an idea planners got from a fetish site.

So how did this go over? Most of her friends aren't parents, and they enjoyed the boozy party. The "gay bears" in particular found it really amusing, she said. Her dad later called after seeing photos to say he appreciated her "performance piece." The only people who seemed to be truly uncomfortable were some of her friends' plus-ones: "I saw a lot of wincing coming from the boyfriends."

The most awkward moment might have been at the end of the party when someone left a smoldering cigarette in a trash can that caused a minor fire scare. When the firefighters were called in, she had to take pains to explain that the "blood" spattered everywhere and bloody adult babies in a crib were nothing to be alarmed about. Firefighters were able to extinguish the fire without incident but it provided a funny photo op:

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Firefighters entered the womb room (Photo courtesy of Kirsten Bosio)