a parking lot. She danced at the Gayety, and she brought an oldtimey 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.” “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 se-
nior 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.
Dancer Bambi Jones, now 78, teaches burlesque history classes in senior centers. “I bring boas and fans,” she says. “They jam in their wheelchairs.”
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 Yorkbased 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 Alli-
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.” w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m j u l y 0 9
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