PHOTOGRAPHED BY GEORDY PEARSON.Burlesque isn’t just stripping
"Burlesque has to be the perfect combination of tease, sex appeal, humor, and social commentary. It’s not enough to just be a beautiful girl seductively stripping out of a gorgeous dress; there needs to be a story behind it. Burlesque came out of vaudeville, which used humor and sexy, dirty jokes, but was also a way for people to comment on what was going on in the world. I love pop culture, so a lot of my acts are based off characters I know and love, like a tribute act to Barbra Streisand or Jesus Quintana in The Big Lebowski or Khal Drogo from Game of Thrones. I think it’s interesting and sexy to play a male character, because I personally feel incredibly powerful onstage, almost in a masculine way. Why does that sense of power automatically have to be associated with masculinity? With burlesque, it’s the perfect opportunity to really play with the preconceptions we have about gender."
What makes me feel glamorous
"I get onstage and look like this perfect, glamorous thing, but nobody knows I hauled my fucking suitcase on the G train, transferred two times, and had to get ready in a tiny bathroom with five other girls and one cracked mirror in the dark. The glamour for me is showing up to the gig, looking like a million bucks, and pretending that I came out of a limo when I didn’t. Offstage, I love wearing a really strong lipstick with no other makeup and sunglasses. I also really love wearing super sexy lingerie under jeans and a T-shirt. Maybe someone will end up seeing the lingerie, maybe they won’t."
How I get in touch with my femininity
"It’s in the details. What’s so cool about burlesque is that you can take off a glove in the same seductive manner that you can take off your bra, and it can be equally, if not more, sexy. You treat that glove like it’s the most precious thing in the world. That guy, or whoever it is in the audience, if he’s going to get that turned on by you taking five minutes to take a glove off, what’s going to happen when you take the other one off — or take your dress off? It also connects to power, and feeling like you have the audience in the palm of your hand."
