Paco Fish: Press

Making It Bigger
Baltimore burlesque grows up, with the help of a little girl and her monkey

By Chris Landers | Posted 3/18/2009

Trixie and Monkey perform Mumbo
Baltimore Theater Project March 18-21.
The Gilded Lilies reprise The Nearly Naked Truth May 22 and Paco Fish hosts a monthly variety show, Vive le Decadence.

It's show time at Load of Fun on North Avenue, and a sold-out crowd files into the black box theater, lingering for a moment at the table in back to pick up a glass of wine or a can of beer before grabbing one of the few remaining folding chairs. Paco Fish, trusted television newsman, takes the stage to present an evening of morality tales about the dangers facing American youth, from hazards foreign and domestic--drugs, sex, homosexuality, communism--you know, "all manner of villainy." He is joined by Viola van Wilde--a wide-eyed innocent--whose body is going through changes she doesn't understand. After delivering some sage and slightly creepy advice, Paco exits, leaving little Viola to her journey of self-discovery set to a slinky big-band bump and grind.

The schoolgirl outfit doesn't stay on for long.

It's the first performance of The Nearly Naked Truth, staged by Gilded Lily Burlesque. Over the course of the evening, Maria Bella succumbs to the temptations of marijuana, Lena Grove demonstrates the torment of the sex addict, and the cast generally shows what happens when good girls go bad. All roads, apparently, lead to damnation, depravity, and pasties.

The Lilies started performing in 2007, a local burlesque troupe that moves from venue to venue--Baltimore's answer to the neo-burlesque scene that started springing up around the country in the mid-'90s. It's an homage filtered through drag shows, performance art, and mixed with a healthy dose of humor--there's more laughter than leering in the house tonight.

The burlesque revival has largely passed through Baltimore for one-off shows before heading to more fertile ground in the New York clubs or Washington's Palace of Wonders, though it wasn't always this way. In 1967, The New York Times wrote that Baltimore was "known among most visitors to the country as the place to go for a sinful night out." The occasion for their article was a charge by a Soviet newspaper that labeled Baltimore a city of sin and symbol of all things decadent and capitalist. The Lilies hope to bring back some of Baltimore's bygone glamour and glitz, like when Blaze Starr hit the stage at the Two O'Clock Club alongside girls with names like Misty Night--"who moves like a ship sliding through the fog."

If this show is any indication, the Lilies are finding an audience here, but it was another performer who laid the groundwork and put Baltimore on the neo-burlesque map. Well, two performers. If you count the monkey.

"I really believe that if it weren't for Trixie, there wouldn't be any burlesque in Baltimore," says Paco Fish during a February interview, of Baltimore's neo-burlesque vanguards.

Trixie Little and the Evil Hate Monkey wasn't the first act Keri Burneston put on stage. She was the founder of Baltimore's Formstone-kitsch performance group Fluid Movement, which introduced audiences to singing sausages (Carmen: The Hot Dog Opera), biography as bellydance (1001 Freudian Nights), and the group's trademark amateur water ballet and roller-skating extravaganzas (Poe on Wheels). Part of Fluid Movement's goal was to put on shows in venues that brought them into the community--Patterson Park, for example--with performers who weren't usually performers.

"I had been doing it for a long time, and I realized that I actually wanted to be in the show," Burneston says by phone from the Vermont circus school where she and her boyfriend Adam Krandle (better known as the Evil Hate Monkey) are honing their new act Mumbo. "I just wanted it to be better and better--I guess I just got fancier ideas. By the time I met Adam, he actually had a ton of theater and musical theater training and dance experience. Our ideas were bigger for what we wanted to do."

Burneston and Krandle met through their day jobs at the non-profit Living Classroom Foundation; she worked with kids, he maintained a fleet of sailboats. During a 2001 corporate-style, team-building retreat, Krandle treated his co-workers (including this reporter, at the time) to a performance he described loosely as a traditional Native American dance in between trust exercises and lessons on the history of the Chesapeake Bay. The loin-cloth and moccasins may have been traditional, the flaming hula-hoop was perhaps less so.

Asked whether this was how Krandle caught Burneston's eye, she says, "No. It was when I found out he was a straight guy who could tap dance."

The act that became Trixie Little and the Evil Hate Monkey came together quickly. In 2002, Burneston had planned a burlesque act with another Fluid Movement member. It didn't work out, but she had already booked a 14 Karat Cabaret performance. "I had been dating Adam at the time," she says. "So I called him up and said, 'Do you want to do this thing?' And he said 'Yeah, why not?' I had a coworker at the time who called me Trixie Little, and Monkey was sort of my pet name for Adam. Within 10 minutes all the pieces fell into place."

Burneston had always sought out interesting performances, from drag shows to the Mummers parade. For the Trixie act, they drew on the circus for their back story, and the duo started heading up to the New England Center for Circus Arts to learn more complex routines and tricks. She says Mumbo is their most ambitious show yet, and video from the circus school backs her up: Trixie and the Monkey dangle above the stage from a dual trapeze, flipping and catching each other without a net. Past shows have included motorcycle/trapeze acts (Krandle learned to operate a motorcycle just days before piloting across a 40-foot high wire as Burneston and another performer did tricks underneath). With every show, Trixie and Monkey have moved further from community theater and closer to full-on polished performers.

They've imparted that lesson to the students at the burlesque classes they've taught sporadically since 2005. In 2006, the students included Sable Sin Cyr, co-founder of the Gilded Lilies, and she returned for a more intensive class later, along with Paco Fish.

Paco Fish, who works as a cytogenetic laboratory tech under the name Paul Galbraith, sits across from Sable, aka Katie Gray, at a Mount Vernon coffee shop, stealing sips from her cup. In 2004, Galbraith took the Dresden Dolls up on their open invitation for fans to perform at their shows. He built a pair of 20-inch stilts and learned to juggle, but he says, "I wanted to put together some kind of act, instead of just flirting with people and walking around looking down their shirts."

"Are they amply bosomed?" Gray asks.

"They're generally corseted," Galbraith says. "I saw the Fluid Movement water ballet--the one about Charles Darwin's struggle to publish Origin of Species. I was like, 'I need to be a part of this.' I knew someone in the show, and I started bugging them until they told me about Glitterama, which was Fluid Movement's variety show at the time. I made a juggling act for that and met Trixie at the show. She invited me to be in one of their shows, and then I took the class."

The Gilded Lilies come from varied backgrounds, Gray's fellow co-founder Maria Bella, who performs a day job under the name Maria Adams, had 15 years of dance training before she took on her pin-up persona. Gray is a trained opera singer with a degree in performing arts.

"At the work shop, Trixie and Monkey really pushed us to become as professional as possible," Gray says. "They really emphasized the need to practice your ass off and make this fantastic. You can't just get up there on stage and take your clothes off. That's not what burlesque is about. Everything they taught us is the bible I use to create my acts now."

"The key phrase in the class they kept using was 'Make it bigger,' which is sort of their philosophy outside the class as well," Galbraith says. "If you're going to do something, do it well. Make it bigger. Make it as glamorous as possible."

"You could call it professionalism," says Gray, in a tone that suggests you shouldn't. "But it was more important that it be quality--that it was professional level, that there was some commitment and quality coming out of what you were doing. That you weren't just screwing around."

Though Galbraith and the Gilded Lily ladies have day jobs, they try to do individual performance or tour in smaller groups. "I do hope we're able to travel more," Adams says of the near future. "Really make a name for ourselves."

Burneston and Krandle have more immediate plans. She is legally going to change her name to Trixie, and then they're packing their bags for New York. It's a bittersweet move, but one that brings them closer to their regular venues. Even while in Vermont, they've been supporting themselves by heading to New York to pack as many shows as possible into a weekend.

Burneston credits Baltimore for nurturing them as performers, from Fluid Movement on. "I don't think it was the intention from the beginning, but there's something about that quirky sensibility," she says. "If Baltimore audiences didn't get it, like, immediately, it probably would have died, but Fluid Movement had an audience from the beginning and we had an audience from the beginning. People just got it right away, and loved it right away, and wanted more all the time.

"It's so fun for us to go back to Baltimore now, especially at the Ottobar," she continues. "It's just so rowdy. We opened our last show there, and it was just amazing, we were like crowd surfing in the audience. You don't get that in New York."

Trixie and Monkey have been able to make burlesque their day job, but it's a tough path to follow. "As glamorous as burlesque is, there's not a lot of money in it," Galbraith says. "It's all about creating the illusion of . . ."

He trails off for a second, and Gray finishes his sentence, "Fabulousness."

June 8, 2009 · 2:36 PM
Taking it off with the many queens of Miss Exotic World 2009

By Jennifer Grafiada

In the hour before the curtain rose on the 19th Annual Miss Exotic World Pageant, there was plenty of décolletage, saturated red lips, immaculately curled hair and whabam outfits filling the usually less than glamorous Orleans Showroom. While burlesque dancers young and old mingled with fans and found their seats, the first performers were busy backstage, pulling on a glove, clipping a garter, adjusting a hat or, for one cheeky man, situating his devil horns just so.

Sitting quietly amid all the fluttering, retro glamorous women, was a diminuitive elderly lady. Everyone else knew that she was the grande dame of the night, the legendary Dixie Evans, curator of the Exotic World Burlesque Museum; the world’s first Marilyn Monroe impersonator and an icon to thousands of burlesque fans: basically, the most revered and prestigious person at the entire event and the reason it existed. But I didn’t.
19th Annual Miss Exotic World

“You approached her accidentally?” A tall Monroe-esque blonde who assisted Dixie in walking asked me in shock. “That’s funny. She’s the reason you’re here.”

Then, a dazzling brunette dancer interrupted us to tell Dixie, with overflowing adoration and respect, “You’re an inspiration to all of us!”

“Oh my gosh, you’re beautiful!” Dixie responded with equal admiration. “These young girls keep me going. I consider every one of them my own. See how grateful these young kids are? It brings tears to my eyes.”

The tall blonde was the World Famous Bob, no less than the main host of the 52nd Annual Striptease Reunion Showcase, held at the Orleans the night before, which honored the most esteemed burlesque performers of past decades.

Burlesque, which became popular in early 20th century America and then died out as more blatantly sexual entertainment replaced it, has been resurrected as a hugely popular and cherished lost art and lifestyle. Once every year for the past 52 years, performers and fans from around the world gather for the four-day Burlesque Hall of Fame Reunion to celebrate their legendary predecessors, find promising new performers and entertain one another. With these spotlight-loving, high-toned characters, there is never a dull moment.

Now that the show was about to start, there was hardly an empty seat in the place. And of those who filled them, there was hardly one who wasn’t dripping in glitter, in glorious curve-hugging dresses. Even the men were dressed to the nines.

But the performers’ costumes were on a new level entirely. Each transformed into a character—Marie Antoinette, Queen of the Cavemen, a Wild West showgirl, a Japanese geisha, a pink gorilla, a bride, a queen, a cat.

Others simply wore beautiful sparkling evening gowns and gloves, which they slowly and seductively removed until they stood on stage, stunningly nearly nude, with only their nipples and you-know-whats covered. Quite a sight.

The performers, all of which used monikers like TaTah DuJour, Peekaboo Pointe and Vivienne VaVoom, basked in the attention. No one stumbled or so much as lost their wide smiles as they shed clothes in a controlled dance. These women were true entertainers - born to shine, sensual to a fault - and the audience loved them.

Not only were there plenty of "oohs" and "ahhs,: there were lots of laughs, too. The ribald and witty repertoire of the emcees, El Vez and Miss Astrid, was better than most stand-up comedy acts, and plenty of the entertainers had a healthy sense of humor.

One woman pulled “a pussy” from deep inside her dress, while another danced in a pink gorilla suit before going down on a banana. The three male competitors of the Best Boylesque category did not take their turns lightly.

Monsieur Paco Fish, in a white 17th century wig, took off his aristocratic layers until he stood in French flag briefs with an Eiffel Tower jutting from his crotch.

Competing for Best Variety was a couple who dangled from a trapeze and a slapstick vaudevillian act. Best Group contestants included a troupe of eight women from Sweden, the Amazing Knicker Kittens, who pranced around with white feather boa tails, and Nanda, a quartet of male ninjas that had an impeccably choreographed fight routine, complete with acrobatic stunts, flips and juggling.

At intermission, I caught Miss Exotic World 2007, Dirty Martini, ordering something from the bar—perhaps her namesake drink. I knew that burlesque is known for celebrating natural femininity, that you can’t be too overweight or too old to perform, but what about women who didn’t have bodacious ta-tas to twirl a tassle on?

“If you don’t have the boobs, if you don’t have the body, you still fucking flaunt what you got,” she responded with characteristic charisma. “It’s not about what you don’t have, it’s about what you do have. It’s not about empowerment, it’s about entertainment.”

Her words were echoed by the lady of the evening, Dixie Evans, when she was led onto the stage to speak before the new queen was announced at the end of the show.

“Legends like Ginger Rogers, Gypsy Rose Lee, many went on to be in motion pictures,” said the tiny white-haired woman with the personality and heart of a giantess. “Many of you are too young to realize how important burlesque was to our entertainment.”

All of the winners were announced: Best Debut: Melody Mangler, Best Variety: Gigi & Pop, Best Boylesque: Hot Toddy, Best Group: Nanda.

Stalling for time while the judges deliberated over the winner of the pageant, Miss Astrid got a few last naughty quips in: “The competition is so tight, they’re working on it right now,” and then “The competition is stiff, they’re working it out right now.” Tigger!, best Boylesque 2006, jumped from his chair, slithered across the stage and began frolicking around, dressed and acting like the court jester.
Local dancer Kalani Kokonuts was crowned Miss Exotic World 2009 and Most Dazzling.

Local dancer Kalani Kokonuts was crowned Miss Exotic World 2009 and Most Dazzling.

And finally, the pageant queen and Miss Exotic World was announced: Las Vegas’ own statuesque Kalani Kokonuts. She also won an equally gigantic trophy for “Most Dazzling.” Indeed, her perfectly sculpted cocoa-creamy body and Vegas-esque larger-than-life feathery and sparkly showgirl costume was breathtaking.

“It’s about fucking time!” and “You’re gorgeous!” came from the crowd as Kalani posed for pictures, cradling her twin trophies with that showgirl smile.

“So how does it feel to win?” I asked her, knowing well the answer would likely be some cliché about hard work finally paying off. But Kalani delivered like true royalty.

“It feels great, I’m just so shocked, but I’m just really stoned right now, so it’s all a dream.”

When she gets up today and gets a look at those trophies Ms.Kokonuts will probably realize that the night, as otherworldly beautiful and dazzlingly colorful as it was, did really happen after all. It was just a more fun, sublime and entertaining version of reality, with much more fascinating people - even the ones who didn’t look it.

Urbanite #61 July 09
By: Greg Hanscom

Photography by J.M. Giordano



The wild ones: Neo-burlesque performers Trixie Little and the Evil Hate Monkey have sparked a revival of vintage striptease acts. But burlesque, some say, never really left Baltimore in the first place.


It’s 10 a.m. on a Thursday, and Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club is waking up. The bartender restocks the shelves, the manager talks on his cell, and a janitor vigorously vacuums the carpet, as if trying to rid the place of its musky, libidinous smell. In the middle of the room, suspended between the twin brass stripping poles on the stage, Trixie Little and the Evil Hate Monkey are flirting with theatrical disaster.

At the moment, Trixie, a petite redhead who is built more like a gymnast than like one of the “Hustler Honeys” who usually perform on this stage, is clinging to a pole with both hands. Her legs are draped over the shoulders of her partner, Monkey, who stands with his head squarely in her crotch, wondering out loud what to do next.

This is not an unfamiliar position for these two, the twin pioneers of Baltimore’s neo-burlesque scene. Monkey (Adam Krandle by day) once drove a motorcycle across a high wire four stories up, while Trixie (formerly Keri Burneston) did stunts on a trapeze below. He’d learned how to operate the machine just days before.

A typical Trixie and Monkey performance layers campy, vaudeville-style striptease with a certain arch irony. It’s a salute to an era when strippers really teased—peeling away layers of fur and feathers and rarely going farther than G-strings and pasties. But neo-burlesque shows add an additional element of pure absurdity that hearkens back to the days before burlesque became synonymous with taking your clothes off—when to “burlesque” something was to turn it on its head.

The routine on which Trixie and Monkey are working is set to premiere on this stage tomorrow night. The pair run through the five-minute sequence several times, starting and restarting a raunchy old garage-rock tune called “Primitive” on a boom box. By opening time, when they have to vacate the stage, they’ve worked out a sequence in which Monkey drops to his back and removes Trixie’s stockings with his teeth. It seems like it ought to work.


“Miss Coney Island” Gal Friday says she once typed seventy words a minute “desk jockeying for ‘the man.’” She and musician Albert Cadabra produce the monthly “Skullduggery and Skin Show” at the Palace of Wonders in D.C.


This will be Trixie and Monkey’s debut at the Hustler Club, the largest and newest club on the Block, the city’s radically diminished but still-breathing downtown adult entertainment district. Most of their local shows have been in very different venues—stripping for artsy crowds at the Creative Alliance or hipsters at the Ottobar. If there is any doubt that Trixie and Monkey will be out of their element here, it vanishes at noon, when the club opens and the house dancers hit the stage. These strippers begin their routines where Trixie and Monkey leave off.

The typical Hustler Club patron does not come for a “show,” in the sense that Trixie and Monkey think of it. Trixie is a sucker for sappy Esther Williams musicals from the 1940s and ’50s; Monkey is a veteran of children’s theater. Their performance tomorrow will feature a parade of like-minded support acts brought in from New York and L.A. But it’s anyone’s guess what the regulars will think of a girl in sequined panties and her boyfriend in his monkey costume.

With thirty-two hours to go before showtime. Trixie and Monkey have heard that plenty of their fans are planning to attend, which is comforting, but also worrisome: How will their crowd handle an evening in the Land of Larry Flynt? Even if the Hustler Honeys are temporarily tucked away behind the scenes, the club’s walls bear the imprimatur of the legendary smut king: huge, explicit photos of nude models, including one sucking a pink dildo. Monkey is nonchalant about the venue, but Trixie admits that she’s a little apprehensive. “People don’t know what they’re getting into,” she says.



There was a time when Trixie, at least, would have fit right in on the Block. The district, which once stretched eight blocks along Baltimore Street, was built on vaudeville and its “naughty cousin,” burlesque. The old Gayety Theatre, home today to the Hustler Club, a porn shop, and another strip club called Norma Jean’s, was the pinnacle of the city’s low culture. In its heyday, which lasted well into the 1950s, the Gayety headlined comedians such as Abbott and Costello, Jackie Gleason, and Red Skelton, and strippers like Gypsy Rose Lee, Sally Rand—and Baltimore’s own Blaze Starr. Born Fannie Belle Fleming, Starr launched her career in the city at age 16 and became famous for daring and sultry routines that got her arrested by vice squads nationwide. Starr later bought the 2 O’Clock Club across the street from the Gayety and helped keep burlesque alive long after it had faded from popularity elsewhere.

Former burlesque dancer Bambi Jones has fond memories of her first show in Baltimore in 1950 at the Maryland Theater just off Howard Street. Before the show, airplanes dropped fliers across the city advertising the featured act, Sally Rand, famous for her fan dance. “I couldn’t believe the patrons,” Jones says. “It was like the opera. They were all dressed in formal attire.”

Even then, the burlesque theaters and nightclubs that had kept Jones’ craft alive were beginning a long decline, brought on by such forces as the rise of pornography and the not-unrelated descent of burlesque into bare-bones stripping. Jones (real name Doris Kotzan), who now lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, recalls club owners bringing in “bar girls,” or “B girls,” who earned a commission by convincing men to buy them drinks. When vice squads cracked down on the practice, arguing that the girls had no business being in the bars, the club owners asked the burlesque dancers to teach the girls a few tricks so they could pass as performers. The theatrical element of burlesque faded, and dancers were told that they had to “mix” with the men or find another venue. (The practice continues today on the Block, where clubs sell “lady drinks”—cocktails for the dancers that go for $20 or more. The dancer generally gets a cut, plus a modest “base rate” if she can get enough of these drinks in a shift; otherwise she makes only tips and fees for lap dances.) And of course, in many clubs, “mixing” was just the start of it. (This practice too lives on today.)

The second and last time Jones was booked in Baltimore, in 1951, the Maryland Theater had been demolished to make way for a parking lot. She danced at the Gayety, and she brought an old-timey touch. “I had been trained by an ex-Rockette,” Jones says. “She told me, ‘Always wear a hat, gloves, stockings. Be a lady.’” But after her first show at the Gayety, the manager found her in the dressing room. “They [the clientele] want to see less panties on you,” he said. She walked out and never came back.

Former burlesque queen Satan’s Angel (born Cecelia Walker) performed in the 2 O’Clock and other Block clubs starting around 1969. She earned her fame twirling flaming tassels on her nipples, then getting five non-flaming tassels whirling at once: “two on my ta-tas, two on my rear-end cheeks, and one on my navel.”

Angel, who now lives in Palm Springs, California, and gives her age as 65, recalls traveling in a circuit from Baltimore to D.C. and Philadelphia, then to Boston and Detroit and back to Baltimore. The girls called it “the Wheel.” “I was on the road ten to twelve months out of the year, working six days a week, with the seventh for travel,” she says. “The clubs were crappy. The dressing rooms were cramped.” But a “feature” performer like her could make $800 to $2,000 a week, plus extra if she was willing to drink with the clientele afterward. “There were a few who played hanky-panky under the table,” Angel says, “but not me.”

Over time, Angel says she began to feel like “a goody two-shoes” because the most she would give her audience was a quick flash of her nearly naked body before disappearing from the stage. At a show in the mid-1980s, a club owner paired her with rising porn star Vanessa del Rio. Angel took it as a slight; she thought pornography was crude. One of Angel’s next co-stars billed herself as an “insertion dancer.” Her main prop was a Tootsie Pop. The final straw came in New York, at a show with a dancer whose deal with the audience, Angel says, was, “For a dollar, you got a lick.”


Waitress and hair stylist Debi Gonzales, a.k.a. Little Luna, performs as a member of Baltimore’s Gilded Lily Burlesque. “Burlesque is a very empowering medium,” she says. “If I have something to say about being a woman, I am able to say it.”


“I went to the owner and said, ‘You have got to be insane. There’s no way I’m doing this,’” she says. “I quit burlesque in 1985.” Like Bambi Jones, she decided that burlesque’s best days were over.

But there is something vampire-like about burlesque. Every time someone declares it dead, it shows up the next day in a slightly different costume. “Through its history, burlesque was considered the dirty end of the entertainment business, yet it’s the thing that won’t go away,” says James Taylor, one of the creators of the now-defunct American Dime Museum and now a partner in the Palace of Wonders, a combination burlesque theater/bar/curiosity museum in Washington, D.C. The ongoing appeal, he says, goes beyond the titillation factor. “Way back in the day, [burlesque dancers] never got past one-piece bathing suits,” he says. “The best of the queens took off the least and still got you there. Gypsy Rose Lee once literally never took off anything but her gloves. She knew that it was the act that pulled it off. It was the show.”

In 2000, fifteen years after Satan’s Angel quit the business, she was running a dinner theater modeled after an Old West bordello in a movie set-turned-tourist trap in Arizona. A visitor noticed her collection of mementos from her days as a dancer. “Who’s that?” asked the woman. “That’s me,” said Angel. The woman, who turned out to be a writer, put Angel in touch with the Burlesque Hall of Fame in Las Vegas. Unbeknownst to Angel, burlesque was making a comeback. The acts that once attracted the vice cops now looked positively wholesome, and they were drawing a curious new generation of fans—urban hipsters looking for a tastefully racy night out.

Today, Angel is back on stage. She performs in theaters around the country, often paired with younger acts. “I’m 65 years old and still bumping and grinding and damn good at it,” she says. Bambi Jones, now 78, gives presentations about burlesque history in senior centers. “I bring boas and fans,” she says. “They jam in their wheelchairs.”




The Hustler Club show, billed half-seriously as Elegance, will be a typical neo-burlesque performance: a shambling revue of strip acts featuring elaborately costumed dancers, interspersed with comic commentary and magic tricks.

At 11 a.m.—nine hours until the curtain’s up—about two-thirds of the cast takes the stage in sweatpants for what will have to pass for a full rehearsal. Trixie and Monkey are joined by one of their Baltimore protégés, Paco Fish (Paul Galbraith). With them is New York-based performer Lynn Sally, who calls herself Dr. Lucky and teaches a class on the history of burlesque at New York University, and a young male acrobatic duo called Twig and Berries (Kevin Beverely and Eric Gorsuch). The MC this evening will be the foul-mouthed Miss Astrid, played by Kate Valentine, who created one of the early neo-burlesque shows, called the Va Va Voom Room, in 1997 in Los Angeles.

If Trixie and Monkey’s rehearsal yesterday failed to inspire confidence, today’s isn’t helping much. The performers attempt to piece together the show’s grand finale, looking like a high school drama club trapped in a very adult playground.

But these jokers have one thing going for them: They’re performing in a city where the circus-sideshow aesthetic has never lost its appeal. Megan Hamilton, program director at the Creative Alliance, started a vaudeville troupe back in 1983, after dropping out of college. At the time, former vaudeville performer Louis “the Hawk” Hawkins was tap dancing for tips in Fells Point bars. “There were links to the living era of vaudeville,” Hamilton says. “Hawkins always used to tell me, ‘You need a shake dancer [for your troupe].’ I never knew what he meant. He was saying we needed a burlesque dancer.”

Laure Drogoul, artist and hostess of the 14Karat Cabaret, remembers visiting the 2 O’Clock Club in the 1980s and watching an act involving a very large woman who used wastepaper baskets for a bra. “I would call that straight-up vaudevillian striptease,” she says. In the 1990s, Drogoul brought adult film performer Annie Sprinkle to her downtown performance space. Sprinkle wasn’t doing traditional burlesque; her performances were feminist commentaries on the sex industry—a theme that has carried through into much of today’s neo-burlesque.

So when Trixie and Monkey arrived on the scene in 2002, they weren’t so much reviving a lost art as taking a cherished tradition in a new direction. Before launching her striptease career, Trixie had studied painting at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, only to take up performance art after graduating. Her first endeavors were puppet shows (one featured hot dog puppets acting out the opera Carmen) and the Fluid Movement community water ballet performances in Patterson Park. “I grew up on The Muppet Show and I Love Lucy reruns. I always loved the spectacle of old musicals,” she says.

Burlesque fit her sensibilities perfectly, and in 2002 she signed herself and a longtime artistic partner up to perform at the Tease-O-Rama burlesque convention in San Francisco. When things fell apart with her partner, she called Krandle, whom she had been dating for about six months. The two had met while working at the downtown environmental education nonprofit Living Classrooms, and Krandle had performed in one of the water ballets. He had dropped out of college after a couple of years studying musical theater in Philadelphia, and she knew he needed an outlet for his creative energy. “Do you want to do this burlesque thing?” she asked. “You’re going to be the Tap Dancing Evil Hate Monkey and I’m going to be Trixie Little.”

Krandle responded, “What’s burlesque?”


Kristin Weisman, an English teacher by day, says she adopted the stage name Lena Grove and joined Baltimore’s Gilded Lily Burlesque in the midst of “sort of a mid-life crisis.” Her 6-year-old daughter recently told a teacher her mother is a Rockette.

To prep for the gig in San Francisco, the duo put together a show and performed it at the 14Karat Cabaret. The premise: A marauding monkey was spreading hate, and the only thing that could save the world was the superheroine Trixie Little, who spanked happiness into the populace. Both shows went well enough that the pair decided to keep developing the characters. Trixie also began offering stripping and act-development classes, training such future co-conspirators as Paco Fish, who now puts on monthly shows at the LOF/t theater on North Avenue with the Gilded Lily Burlesque.

Along with a handful of local honors (including first place in the Mayor’s Christmas Parade in Hampden and a near-arrest for indecent exposure at a Charm City Roller Girls competition), Trixie and Monkey won Best Burlesque Duo at the 2006 Exotic World competition in Las Vegas, put on since 1990 by the Burlesque Hall of Fame. They developed a small if fanatical cult following (Monkey’s fans sometimes bring him bananas backstage). And they landed gigs at arty venues in Washington, D.C., and New York City, where the duo plans to move this fall. To hone their acrobatic skills, they spent two years attending circus school in Vermont.

But while they fantasized about someday taking burlesque back to the Block, it seemed impossible: Burlesque and modern stripping were like estranged siblings who wouldn’t be caught dead in the same room.

Then, one night this January, a man named George approached Trixie after a show at the Ottobar. George (who prefers not to use his last name in this article) had been brought to Baltimore by the owner of the Hustler Club to breathe some new life into the place and shake off the Block’s unsavory reputation. He was looking for something, he said, that would recall the Gayety Theatre’s glory days. “I want a show,” he told Trixie. “I want musicians and acrobats.” Trixie nearly jumped out of her pasties.




It’s 6 o’clock, and George is a nervous wreck. In the year and a half he’s been here, he has done his best to turn the Hustler Club into “a gentleman’s playground,” featuring such attractions as Henry Hill, the ex-mobster who inspired the movie Goodfellas, and Ultimate Fighting Championship prizefighters. But this will be his first foray into burlesque. He has hardly seen Trixie and Monkey, who are just back from circus school. Trixie booked all their accompanying acts and corresponded with George by e-mail.

Particularly vexing to George: men on the Hustler Club stage. George saw Twig and Berries perform at the Ottobar and fears the regular clientele may not take kindly to their racy stunts. (During their rehearsal this morning, a club janitor skulked around the edges of the theater, muttering, “What are they doing up there?”) George is particularly worried about a move Twig and Berries pulled at the Ottobar that he calls “the dry hump.”

“Please, Lord God,” he prays, “don’t let them add the dry hump routine to this one.”

George is also worried about the house dancers, who will have to sit through this circus when they would otherwise be performing. Hustler Club dancers are independent contractors; they actually pay a small fee to use the space and take home only tips (their “ones”) and fees for lap dances and shows in private rooms. Then there’s the portion of the audience that will be visiting the club—and the Block itself—for the first time. George hoped to have the place done up “real throwback,” with white tablecloths and a valet parking service. “You want your customers to spend as little time on the Block as possible,” he says. Neither have materialized. This evening’s guests will get the raw experience.

This is especially true because the posters advertising the event say the show starts at 8 p.m., but Trixie and friends won’t take the stage until 9. So, as the crowd rolls in, they are greeted by a full hour of the Hustler Club’s standard fare.

As the crowd files in, the house dancers go through their paces, strutting and writhing for a handful of men sitting belly to the bar. A brass-haired beauty spreads her legs for one of the patrons as Aerosmith’s “Rag Doll” blares from the speakers. The newcomers look positively bewildered. Some gather in reserved booths and try not to gawk at the activity onstage. Others stand awkwardly in tight clusters. A gray-haired woman sits, legs crossed, watching the dancers with a mixture of disdain and pity.

Forty agonizing minutes tick by. But the dancers are gorgeous, every one, and they’re good at what they do; those who allow themselves to look can’t help but be drawn in by the spectacle. When, at 8:55, a Hustler Honey slides down one of the brass poles from the second floor, legs flared, wearing nothing but a G-string, the crowd erupts in applause. On the dance floor, it begins to snow money. Even the too-cool burlesque crowd has been won over.


New York-based Peekaboo Pointe, who has taken on the title “the fastest tassel twirler from East to West,” can occasionally be seen at the Palace of Wonders in D.C.


A little after 9 o’clock, a voice announces the start of Elegance, an Elvis tune replaces the heavy metal, and the show everyone has come for begins. Coney Island burlesque sensation Gal Friday struts onstage in cowboy boots, a halter top, full panties, and a purple belt buckle the size of a tea saucer. She wields a pair of popguns and keeps the crowd riled for twenty minutes, raking in a pile of tips while never giving up her panties and tasseled pasties.

The rest of the night is a blur of fur and feathers. Peekaboo Pointe, a performer from New York, cranks out a series of athletic numbers, doing impossible, pepper-grinder gyrations with her muscled, tattooed torso. A musician billed as Albert Cadabra pulls a succession of oddities out of his pants. Twig and Berries do a bullfight routine that culminates with them wearing only shiny gold hot pants. And Trixie and Monkey bring the house down disrobing each other to Bonnie Tyler’s cheesy ’80s hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” During one of Monkey’s solo numbers, three Hustler Honeys stuff his furry vest with tips.

Finally, a giant champagne glass is carried in and filled with bubbly. The cast slides out of the spotlight, and the evening’s grand dame, burlesque legend Catherine D’lish, struts in to the tune of “Hey Big Spender.” A porcelain-skinned goddess in an ermine coat, D’lish begins to peel off her clothing, one silky, sequined piece at a time. A man tipsily approaches the stage with a bill in his hand; Paco Fish, taking the man for a club regular, pulls him back and tells him to drop the tip onstage, so he doesn’t disrupt the routine. But D’lish, who got her start as a teenager in seedy strip clubs in San Diego, knows exactly what to do. She has the man slip the bill under her garter belt, then remove one of her elbow-length white gloves with his teeth. Then she sends him back to his seat.

D’lish finishes the evening by climbing into the glass of bubbly and sponging off her not-quite-naked body. It must be the sexiest thing this club has seen in a long time. Even the Honeys are wowed.

Tomorrow, George will send the club owner a video of the performance and suggest that he schedule Trixie and Monkey at one of the clubs he owns on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Trixie and Monkey will start to plan their move to New York and practice their routines for the upcoming Exotic World competition in Las Vegas. But tonight, it’s time to celebrate.

When the crowd at the Hustler Club thins out after midnight, the burlesque cast heads across the street to the 2 O’Clock Club, Blaze Starr’s old stomping grounds. There, they slide into the undulating crowd—the music bumping, the girls stripping down to nothing but their high-heeled dancing shoes—and marvel at how much, and how little, has changed.

—Greg Hanscom is Urbanite’s senior editor.


For more on this story, listen to the Marc Steiner Show on July 9.


WEB EXCLUSIVE PHOTOGRAPHS


Stripping is about an exchange of power: Men have power over women with their money; women have power over men with their bodies,” says Kate Valentine, who plays the potty-mouthed burlesque M.C. Miss Astrid. “Burlesque is not a power play. It’s more a celebration of identity. It’s satire. People think, ‘Everybody is taking off their clothes so it must be the same,’ but it ends up being very different.


At a recent burlesque revue at Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club on the Block, dancers walked a line between vintage vaudeville-style striptease and bawdy modern exotic dancing. New York-based Peekaboo Pointe kicked off her set with a pussycat routine.


The “boylesque” duo Twig and Berries (Kevin Beverely, top, and Eric Gorsuch) met Baltimore neo-burlesque pioneers Trixie Little and the Evil Hate Monkey at circus school in Vermont. “I don’t know anything about burlesque,” Beverely told veteran performer Catherine D’lish before the recent show at the Hustler Club. “There’s not much to know,” D’lish replied. “It’s supposed to be fun.”


When she’s not performing, Lynn Sally, a.k.a. “Dr. Lucky,” teaches a course called “The History of American Burlesque” at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. In the 19th century, she says, “a ‘burlesque’ was an inversion. It was lowbrow entertainment. Women played men’s parts. They made fun of the aristocracy. The low characters were played high, and the high characters were played low.”


“I love having a costume hidden within a costume … the transformation of character and the process of revealing different punch lines,” says Baltimore performer Paul Galbraith, a.k.a. Paco Fish, a member of the Gilded Lily Burlesque. “The act has to get bigger toward the end.” In the finale of Fish’s solo act at the recent Exotic World competition, a spring-loaded Eiffel Tower erupted from his French-tricolore hot pants.



“I like big flashy clothes and make-up. I feel like I’m not whole unless I’m over the top,” says Kristen Weisman, a.k.a. Lena Grove, an English teacher by day and a member of Baltimore’s Gilded Lily Burlesque. “I’m a mom. This is something fun that I can still do and still feel pretty young.”


Maria Bella (real name Maria Rullo), one of the founding members of Baltimore’s Gilded Lily Burlesque, did modern, jazz, and Latin dance before she took up taking-it-off in 2007. “I love the glamour, the expression of creativity, and performance in general,” says the aspiring nurse, who works for a financial publishing house. “It’s a way to express your sexuality and have fun.”


Baltimore’s Gilded Lily Burlesque, pictured here during a recent show at the Mobtown Theatre, got its start in November 2007 with a casting call sent out on MySpace. Today, the collective includes a cast of seven that performs at the LOF/t theatre on the last Saturday of each month. In addition to burlesque, the troupe also features performers doing the hula hoop and lyra (a trapeze in the form of a large metal hoop).

Fish, Paco

Boylesque / Get ready for a version of burlesque as only Hula’s Bar & Lei Stand can present it. Get ready for Boylesque–billed as “An Evening of Song, Dance, and the Art of the Tease.” Most likely it isn’t the “Tag, you’re it!” type of “tease” though. The night will be hosted by Twan and will feature Miss Catwings from the Cherry Blossom Cabaret, Pride Idol 2009’s Maka Esteban and the intriguing Paco Fish, the cabaret performing alter ego of one Paul Galbraith. During the day, he’s a cytogenetics technologist, but when the sun goes down, he becomes a dynamic performer of spoken humor, physical comedy, burlesque, circus shenanigans and anything else that takes place on a stage. Free your mind and the rest will follow!

Paco Fish is never short on inventive ideas for tickling the senses- this time with pockets and ribbons and gifts a plenty. The man is a wild stilt-walking veritable theater of talent - he can dance too.