In the middle of her performance at Club Deluxe on Haight Street, Natasha Fatale’s pastie shoots off. She tries to get up from the vinyl chair she’s sitting on but takes it along with her. She panics but manages to wiggle it off her butt. Smiling at the gentleman in front of her, she paces backward to pick up the sequined scrap, licks the back, and slaps it on her nipple.

In the finale her heel breaks, but like a pro, she giggles and plays into the mistake. The audience cheers and she saunters off stage and plops on a bench. “My pastie fell off. It flew across the room,” she squeals, clutching her black dress over her chest while a strand of her red hair falls over her left eye. The other ladies backstage in the kitchen gasp but encouragingly say, “It happens.” “[My heel] was like a dying sailor to a boat,” she cracks.

Five months ago, Fatale was encouraged to pursue burlesque at the Tease-o-Rama burlesque convention. She watched videos like Lady of Burlesque for pointers on her vintage performance, but she’s a rookie compared to the other performers at Little Minsky’s burlesque night. The show is inspired by the original 1917 Little Minsky’s theater in New York. Every third Thursday of the month producer Douglas Good and Margo “The Flying Fox” bring the five-dollar show to San Franciscans.

With the popularity of the Pussycat Dolls and Dita Von Teese, the revival of burlesque has hit Hollywood like it hit Broadway in the early twentieth century. While shows are popping up in many major cities, small communities of self-made acts and performers are taking their professional ballet and singing talents to a sensual level.
In the late 1860s, the art form started with Lydia Thompson in London. Incorporating dance and theatre, Thompson was the first English actress to bring her dance company, The British Blondes, to the American stage in New York. Early burlesque incorporated satire and became striptease. Eventually it hit mainstream, and its allure trickled its way to the working class. Burlesque thrived in the 1920s and 30s, but died in the 1960s, according to Isis Starr, a sixty-one-year-old dancer who dropped out of the San Francisco Ballet to pursue burlesque when she was 21.

At Little Minsky’s, dressed in a white-fringed gown, Starr strips down to a white thong and one silver pastie. Noticing that the right tassel is missing, she covers her right breast and twirls her left.

Starr has performed at Moulin Rouge and Crazy Horse, but none compare to her favorite performance: the San Quentin Prison Christmas show in 1972. A bright light was cast on the stage where she go-go danced with another woman. The prisoners were left in the dark with ten feet of space separating them from the stage. Starr felt their energy.

“There were 3,000 men going ape-shit. It’s a raw energy to feel an audience that wants you—you wanna rip out your heart and throw it on the stage for them,” Starr recalls. She danced for the San Francisco Ballet in the mid-70s, but after her ballet master found out she was stripping at night, he propositioned her with an ultimatum. “Ballet or burlesque?” he asked. She was making seventy dollars a week in ballet, compared to three-hundred stripping and go-go dancing.

Starr found dancing in the evening more exciting than the regimental ballet. With the odds stacked against tiptoeing around in tights, Starr abandoned the ballet where there was no room to be unique. She lent her talents to North Beach’s Condor Club, the world’s first topless and bottomless bar, where she understudied Carol Doda.

The 1962 film Gypsy Rose Lee inspired Starr when she was twelve years old, but the burlesque scene died in the 1960s, before her time. She go-go danced and stripped but incorporated the theatrics of burlesque and even performed her own en pointe act.

“There’s always been a stigma to taking your clothes off. Ballet is an art form, and taking your clothes off is not,” says Starr. “If you were a stripper or did burlesque, you were a tart—a loose woman who didn’t have morals. But burlesque is women taking back their power,” she says. “This is my body, this is my strength. Just because you take your clothes off in front of people doesn’t mean you are a whore. It means you are comfortable with who you are.”

Burlesque is back. Women and men of diverse ages, body types and talents have shimmied forward to spice things up and celebrate sensuality.

The strum of a harp from Pink Martinis’ “Una Notte a Napoli” introduces the red-outfitted Kellita. She sways her hips to mid-tempo bongos and piano sounds of the Italian jazz recording.

“Cuanto tempo puo durare?” goes the song. She twirls her body and pirouettes to sway her hips.

She saunters to her knees, pushing her chest up. The tempo slows and her belly undulates. She clasps the strings on her top like a harp and pulls the laces from top to bottom. “Ed in cielo-mi-ha-abban-Donato,” the song continues.

Kellita stands up with her hands over the front of her loosened top. The mandolin plays. She turns her back to the audience. Then, on the chorus, she whips her top off and unties her red skirt, shimmying in red pasties and flashing bits of her thighs and butt.

Although she dances solo tonight at Red Hots Burlesque, Kellita books shows with her Samba-inspired dance troupe, Hot Pink Feathers, which she started in 2000. At the age of forty, Kellita has danced professionally and incorporates a worldly niche to her showgirl-esque troupe. She spends most of her time with the troupe and teaching classes, though she works about four days a month as a neuropsychological testing technician. Her dream is to dance with Pink Martini live and to make burlesque her full-time gig. It’s where she can truly exhibit her senses.

“I use the vocabulary my body knows. It’s a physical practice that allows me to feel fully inspirited. Everybody has that, but we’re taught to rein it in. It’s very satisfying to be able to use my craft to let it out and convey my full, raw spirit,” she says.

Some may disregard burlesque as a pastie away from stripping, but appealing storylines and sensual, playful pieces create a certain allure for audiences.

“The aesthetic has come to popular culture, but the heart of the movement is still underground,” she says. “The unadulterated burlesque show still hasn’t yet been discovered or understood by the mainstream.”

The “heart of the movement” is the D.I.Y. of rehearsing, self-promoting, and threading outfits for an affordable but spectacular show. Beginners and professionals like Kellita can perform on the same stage to transport the audience to another era.

Sin’cerity and Miss Bliss of Peekaboo Burlesque, and Dottie Lux, creator of Red Hots Burlesque in New York, incorporate a storyline or message into their acts.

George Bush’s cartoon face projects on Dottie Lux. looking straight ahead she marches to Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name Of.” At one point she coughs up syrupy “blood” down her chest, rubbing some onto her thigh. Stripped down to sparkly fishnets, she tweaks her silver discs and pulls them off.

“No Bush in O-EIGHT,” she says with her Brooklyn twang. She is more vulgar than most of the performers in the scene, but she sends a heavy message.

Juxtaposing comedy and dance, the ladies of Peekaboo mock Molly Ringwald and wheel out on tricycles at 80s night at the Hubba Hubba Revue, a monthly variety show. They toss their bras off, exposing ghost and packman appliqués, hop on plastic bikes, and race, crashing into each other. The keyboard synth beats of “Thriller” blast and they rise as Zombies. Peekaboo uses vaudeville and tongue-in-cheek to exhibit their humor on stage.

“I don’t care if we perform for guys,” says Miss Bliss. After seeing a show, it’s the ladies in the audience who show the most appreciation.
“We get all these mixed messages from the media, that women are supposed to be evocative and chased, and here it just doesn’t matter,” says Sin’cerity.

Back at Little Minsky’s, Kristina Cañizares moves her hips to ethnic DJ beats in the encircled-center of viewers. There’s no fire tonight because she’s performing solo, but she and her troupe, The Nekyia (pronounced Nek-eye-ya) incorporate belly dance and fire eating into their shows, including flame accessories on their breasts. The Nekyia are part of the neo-burlesque movement that fuse modern music and dance styles outside the early 20th century style similar to Isis Star and Natasha Fatale. After studying English Literature at UC Berkeley, Cañizares danced in school and traveled the world to practice belly dance and capoeira. She pursued her career, but she missed the empowerment of dance. She decided to promote and perform full-time for Hot Pink Feathers and started the Nekyia.

“I enjoy it. My work and dance is a way of exploring my sexuality. The way women are portrayed in our culture is still rooted in the Madonna-whore complex. You’re either a good girl or a bad girl. Rarely does our culture show women’s desire as something that is natural and healthy. Usually we are the object of men’s desire,” says Cañizares.

These women embody their art form. They are sassy, aggressive, sweet, and demure. But most of all they are uninhibited, because sexuality is not its own entity—it’s part of a person. The revival of burlesque is more than just titillation. It’s a venue where women don’t flaunt their sensuality—they own it.