The Burlesque Handbook

Introduction:

A Lifetime of Discovering Burlesque and a Brief History of Bold Women

What first drew you to burlesque? I’d like to share my story with you, obviously because I hope you’ll enjoy it, and also because I hope it will start you thinking about your own story, and everything you have to bring to the stage and to the audience of this very approachable and charming performing art.

Like most people, I had an impression of burlesque before I knew what it was called. I remember photographs of undomesticated women, performers who were usually unnamed but who I later learned included Blaze Starr, Tempest Storm, and Candy Barr. I remember references to stripteasers in cartoons and films—fluttering lashes, a seductively rolled shoulder, the drop of a boa. . .

I loved stripteasers. I also loved other female stars in film and photographs, but I felt a kinship to the strippers that was special. I could tell that their lives hadn’t been easy, and for me that was part of their appeal. The photographs I admired most weren’t mere modeling shots; they showed women scantily clad, dancing with abandon and acting like tigers. Not motherly tigresses, but tigers—owning and dominating the viewer with exaggerated movement and shameless display. I knew instinctively that these were my people, my forebears, and that they had the energy I wanted to carry and continue.

I also saw the movie Gypsy, which was released the year I was born. I was not so interested in the I’m a pretty girl, Mama! discovery that Gypsy made, but in the confidence she displayed onstage and the way she was able to take over her life once she made a commitment to be proud of her decisions. I loved when she said, Nobody laughs at me, because I laugh first. I knew that was a position of strength and defiance rather than of self-ridicule. I knew that it meant she understood the context of her career, and by being willing to laugh at herself and her pretensions she was also laughing, yet with some affection and gratitude, at those who bought into her persona. I couldn’t articulate it at the time, but this all made sense to me. Gypsy’s survivor’s story was ultimately more motivating to me than Marilyn Monroe’s equally beautiful and stirring vulnerability. And I believed, I knew, that taking off a glove had the power attributed to it in the film.

As I grew up I developed some literary pretensions myself, and studied and wrote meticulous poetry informed by poets as diverse as T. S. Eliot, Rimbaud, and Judy Grahn. At this time, because I had been studying literature and theater, I understood burlesque as something like a satirical device and understood that Saturday Night Live, which changed my life, was informed by the historical tradition of exaggeration and parody. This was in high school, and at around that time I created a character named Prunella DuBois to play at The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Prunella’s absurd and simple poetry was more limerick than lyrical, required no footnotes, and was ultimately better for my mental health than seeking Rimbaud’s dérèglement de tous les sens. To this day, the structure of the one-page poem and the limerick inform my sense of how choreography and narrative should be structured.

I don’t have to jump very far ahead in my life story to get to my career in strip joints.

At eighteen, I flew out of the house like a bat out of hell (or a biker zombie out of a grave, if you will) and immediately went to work in a strip joint in Atlanta. When I entered the Classy Cat on Piedmont Road, a club I’d driven by dozens of times when I was too young to enter, I was disappointed by the lack of glamour. I saw a woman onstage in a spandex costume that, while it had some stretchy superhero appeal, could not compare to the images of Lili St. Cyr and Liz Renay in my head. The woman also had something like a dirty green flower strapped to her thigh, and I couldn’t imagine what appeal she thought this strange accessory might have. Then I got a closer look at it and realized it was an elastic garter full of money, and I thought, I’d wear that.

My stripping career occurred during the era between burlesque and pole dancing. Because I started working the clubs in 1980, there were still a few dancers who had done burlesque in the fifties and sixties around. Some of them were still dancing but most of them were not interested in the full-nude table-dance format of those clubs (and were sometimes quite willing to air their contempt for us for doing it); however, they could still be found working in the clubs as costumers or managers, wearing fabulous hair and nails and giving us great advice about showmanship and terrible advice about how to make money. I listened to them with delight, loving their stories of diamonds and minks and martinis, even when they insulted us for our spandex and cocaine. In my pragmatic way I understood that my job was essentially a service and sales job, albeit one that allowed for a certain kind of self-expression, and I studied books on maximizing sales as well as studying dance and the quotes of Mae West and Isadora Duncan.

Working in strip joints was high in drama but lacking in theater. Flush with cash yet yearning to express myself in some less commercial fashion, I performed at a Dylan Thomas level of drunkenness at punk poetry readings, where I inevitably took off my clothes rather than supplying footnotes. Managers of those bars often asked me not to strip in their places because they didn’t have permits for it, but I kept thinking I was somehow going to tap into the spirit of Yoko Ono having her clothes cut off (which I later paid tribute to on a strip-joint stage in a way I’m sure would have been completely unrecognizable to Yoko) and of Lady Godiva, and I kept taking off my clothes even when I wasn’t getting paid. In fact, it meant more to me when I wasn’t being paid—it meant a lot to me to be inappropriate, and in a strip joint, stripping is appropriate behavior.

I had loved the character of punk in the seventies, when we looked at pictures of Bettie Page and wondered what her story might be (which was shortly revealed to us in Greg Theakston’s The Betty Pages). In the 1980s, while doing poetry readings and ingesting horrifying amounts of contraband, I enjoyed hanging out at a huge elaborate bar called Club Rio, where the Cramps played and where I saw performance art and drag by John Sex, Jayne County, Phoebe Legere, and RuPaul, who summed it up with a shrug: We’re born naked. After that, it’s all drag. I identified with this because we strip-joint strippers called our spandex costumes, fake tans, teased hair, and colored contacts drag because we had to drag it with us to go to work and wouldn’t have dreamed of wearing it anywhere else. But it was every kind of drag.

I knew that somewhere—Las Vegas? Broadway?—contemporary performers were doing fan dances and other salutes to the burlesque striptease of the 1950s, but except for glimpses of Venus DeLight on HBO’s Real Sex (you can see her in episode five, 1993, which also features New York nightlife impresario Susanne Bartsch and German sex toy entrepreneur Beate Uhse), I had never seen one of them on film, much less live. I had seen Diane Lane perform a stunning and rebellious fan dance in the movie The Big Town, which for me raised the question of whether an actress was a real stripper if she just played one in a movie, even if playing one in a movie involved real stripping. I had also seen Venus DeLight eating fire in the documentary Stripper (1986). The Real Sex clip, in which Venus did her versions of many of the classic burlesque numbers I’d seen in still images, such as the half-man/half-woman act with a puppet and the bath in a giant champagne glass, excited my devoted stripper’s heart with the realization that these ideas didn’t need to be lost to strip joints forever; they could be made alive for new generations.

I wanted to do punk-rock striptease and performance art, but at that time most of the men who frequented strip joints were of the wrong generation to want to hear the Ramones, and when I was at work, I worked. I also wanted to play with my visions of the golden era of striptease, so I became a feature dancer. There is, in a small number of strip joints known as the feature circuit, a world for women who want to do elaborate themed acts, booked by agencies that specialize in this circuit. One agency I worked with, Continental, was owned by a former burlesque star named Rita Atlanta. Her son was one of my agents, which reminded me there were few degrees of separation between the features and the burlesque stars of previous decades. While some feature dancers performed straightforward live sex-toy shows, most did theme numbers—a nurse, a teacher, a bride—in which the first two or three songs were elaborate and theatrical, while in the last two or three the features conformed to the same standards as the house dancers, the local full-time dancers, and were more interactive with the audience. In one of my numbers, for instance, I did a tribute to Laugh-In that began with me dressed like a character from Hair, then at the end I had the audience members decorate my body with paint and brushes that I passed out to them when they tipped me.

I did my first real live fan dance in 1993 in a strip club called the Cheetah III in Atlanta during their annual show The Battle of the Cheetah Girls, a friendly competition among the house dancers. House dancers usually had little opportunity to do anything theatrical in the club, but for this event they could create one-song themed acts.

When it was my turn I spent several minutes trying to convey to the MC, a moderately successful comedian whose name I have forgotten, what the hell I was up to. He looked at the introduction I had written and then at me. You just got finished performing for the crowned heads of Europe? Are you European? he asked me.

Oh, no, not at all, I said, I’m local.

So why does it say so in your introduction?

It’s . . . I shrugged, at a loss to explain what seemed so obvious to me. It’s burlesque, like a joke.

Okay . . . so what is a fan dance?

At the time it was very difficult to come up with that fan dance. I didn’t know how to do research for it. I didn’t have YouTube or Wikipedia or Google. All I had found in the library were a few short clips of Sally Rand, with little of her story and no description of her technique. I had been able to find the fans by searching for feathers in the yellow pages in New York and was astonished to find Eskay on Thirty-eighth Street actually had such fans in stock. "For Chicago on Broadway," the proprietor explained to me.

I knew about Chicago on Broadway—I knew that it was the work of choreographer and director Bob Fosse, whose movies Cabaret, Lenny, and All That Jazz had inspired me with certain ideas, some of them perhaps not so healthy (and some of those less healthy ideas being the most appealing to my perverse young self), about what it could be like to lead an inspiring and inspired life in performance and dance. Lenny and All That Jazz showed stripteasers of the mid-twentieth century in a particularly interesting light, and it was obvious that the styles as well as the lifestyles of those burlesque performers had some influence on Fosse’s content and form as well as on his tone.

Because feature dancing involved traveling alone, I hated it and tapered off my bookings. However, I found the subculture of feature dancing fascinating and began to write a weekly column about it for Creative Loafing, Atlanta’s version of the Village Voice, and worked as a bartender at the Goldrush Showbar to watch feature dancers so I could interview them. I saw incredible things: Blondage, a pair of porn stars, made tens of thousands of dollars in just a few days; Melissa Wolf opened a new age of entrepreneurialism for strippers with her pay website and her merchandising; Venus DeLight and Vanna Lace continued re-creating and re-forming classic striptease themes; and a stripper whose name escapes me came onstage with a live white tiger, which I have to assume was illegal.

Although I was performing at Fetish Night at Atlanta’s Masquerade, eating fire with the Impotent Sea Snakes (a Tubes-influenced, X-rated rock drag band) and training their other fire eaters, I missed traveling to New York to work and decided to move there. I sold all my costumes and props and moved into a charming walkup on Christopher Street with my friend Judith, with whom I presented papers addressing my disagreements with proposed antipornography legislation at ritzy academic events such as the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division Meeting, and eventually at the UN. I became quite the sex workers’ rights activist. I also got a bartending job at Flashdancers on Broadway (the strip joint by David Letterman’s studios) so I could study feature dancing some more.

Eating fire at Pinchbottom Burlesque in 2008, over a decade after my feature career. PHOTOGRAPH BY MONTY LEHMAN.

I worked with Whitney Ward, whose costumes for the Mermaid Parade are events in themselves, and got to know her husband, Joe Coleman, whose performances incorporated pranks and blasphemy. I discovered rock ’n’ roll drag at a spectacular level at Don Hill’s at New York’s notorious SqueezeBox party. I remember watching Justin Bond while he was singing All Tomorrow’s Parties and understanding that I could combine all my influences and make my own new form of art. I was blown away by Mistress Formika, Sherry Vine, and Jackie Beat. My boyfriend Rocket was in a pyro glam band called the Toilet Boys that featured a drag lead singer, Miss Guy. I was performing at Mother’s Click ’n’ Drag night as a fetish performer, and people were still baffled that I insisted on taking off my clothes. I was being presented as a dominatrix, which I was, and one supposedly submissive person said to me, Dominant women don’t strip.

I responded, Dominant women don’t follow rules. I hadn’t run away with the circus in order to be ladylike. Role-playing essentialists might not have understood, but it was clear to me—I was ready to define what I was without restrictions, whether those restrictions were based in a conservative or a libertarian philosophy. I knew I wasn’t alone.

The sign at Sideshows by the Seashore.

My friend Bambi the Mermaid invited me to a burlesque show she was in. I fully believed that people could be doing burlesque numbers, but I had no idea that there was such a thing as an entire burlesque show. Loving Bambi and curious as hell, I followed her out to Coney Island to see a Burlesque at the Beach show in the Sideshows by the Seashore theater.

I watched Bonnie Dunn do a fan dance. Julie Atlas Muz portrayed The Death of a Showgirl. Dirty Martini gave birth to a mink to Take Back Your Mink. Tigger! did acrobatic drag as Tawny the Tigress, a sparkly and battered transvestite hooker. The Great Fredini did terrible, hilarious magic. Bambi stripped out of a chicken costume, laid an egg, and ate it. My life changed forever. I grabbed Bambi after the show and said, I do that! That’s what I do!

Shortly thereafter I followed Bambi to Kate Valentine’s astonishing Va Va Voom Room, where I sat next to Lily Burana and heard her describe it as a circus for adults. I got hooked and stayed hooked.

I joined the Blue Angel Cabaret and performed weekly. It took me a while to learn to edit the timing of my numbers from the fifteen-to-twenty-five-minute sets I had been required to do as a feature dancer into three-to-five-minute songs, but it was nearly precisely the format I’d done in The Battle of the Cheetah Girls, where we were permitted only one song, so I was able to adapt based on that experience.

I found myself among circus and drag performers again, just like in my high school Rocky Horror days. I couldn’t have been happier.

Ironically, I occasionally found myself criticized by burlesque aficionados who were offended that a strip-joint stripper was performing on a burlesque stage and considered my style to have been tainted by my sex industry experience. Essentially, they were saying that a stripper couldn’t be a burlesque performer. Having just had antiporn feminists inform me that I couldn’t accurately describe sex work because I had actually done it (that is, unless my description of sex work was what they needed to hear), I was ready for this kind of nonsense. I persisted in the burlesque scene and found a huge amount of love and generosity. Dirty Martini, who sports a nifty MFA in dance, told me, "Your strip joint experience does inform your burlesque performance, and I think it’s wonderful."

I studied burlesque theatrical history again for the first time since high school, with a different perspective. Theatrical burlesque wasn’t dead or just a novelty act to baffle strip-joint customers at the Cheetah; it was thriving on a new circuit, outside of strip clubs. However, as a literary pretender and an academic dilettante, I was compelled to understand it artistically and socially. As it turns out, burlesque history is full of genius and passion and playfulness and dirty-mindedness combined with a willingness to do darn near anything to get applause.

The essential timeline of burlesque history as it relates to striptease is reported consistently, although it’s hard to know the details with surety since burlesque history is primarily reported by burlesque performers, who are hucksters and prevaricators in the fine tradition of P. T. Barnum. In theater history, sensational press releases were often quoted as if they were hard news (not that current newspapers, for the most part, treat press releases with any more care), and urban legend was reported as common knowledge. The death of burlesque reputedly occurred in multiple eras, yet it seems not to have died. There is, however, a canon of burlesque history that you’ll find helpful in understanding the roots of this unique art form. I’ll give the light version, which should provide you with keywords, personalities, and subjects to research on your own, plus a list of books that will give you the same expertise as most burlesque experts—we all read the same ten books!

Many dictionary and encyclopedia entries for burlesque refer to the literary tradition and historical theatrical definitions of burlesque, definitions which on their own are slightly archaic. When the word burlesque is used as a verb, certainly it’s understood to mean that exaggeration and parody are being used; however, for nearly one hundred years, burlesque as a noun has referred to shows that contain variety, comedy, and girlie numbers as well. Striptease has been part of burlesque since the 1920s, and it is a huge component of neo-burlesque.

Today’s burlesque performers may be male, female, or any gender, but most of them use adult humor, and many of the strippers in today’s burlesque shows incorporate comedy and variety into their numbers, serving more than one function. The showgirl remains the headliner, but burlesque striptease now offers a whole new venue and a higher level of appreciation for performers who would have been viewed only as novelty performers in twentieth-century burlesque shows. All performers may play all roles; the MC may strip, and the strippers may talk or juggle or do acrobatics or perform comedy during their strips. Dictionaries and other reference works, by their very nature, are often a bit behind on the popular usage of a given term, since they can only give a definition after it has been put into effect. The best way to see burlesque defined is to go to a high-quality show!

I learned that burlesque as a theatrical form that prominently featured the display of feminine figures came to America in the mid-1800s with Lydia Thompson and her British Blondes spoofing Greek mythology in their presentation of Ixion. They instantly became a huge hit and moved their show from a small theater to one of the most prestigious in the world. They were considered outrageous in an era where women were covered in heavy clothing and discouraged from any kind of public display. They were raucous onstage and dressed in versions of men’s costumes that showed their legs. At that time even ballerinas had to wear longer skirts, so the outrage was enormous.

Burlesque developed on Broadway over the next several decades with shows showing more and more flesh and fewer and fewer mores. Florenz Ziegfeld produced critically acclaimed Broadway shows for high society glorifying the American girl from about 1907 to 1931, featuring scantily clad, slender women in enormous headdresses as a signature feature of his variety shows, while the