What Excites Us!

Episode 35: The Burlesque Hall of Fame with director Dustin M. Wax

Transcript:

Ep 35 - Burlesque Hall of Fame with Dustin M. Wax

[00:00:00] Gwyn: Hello and welcome to What Excites Us, the podcast that discusses sex and sexuality through a lens of acceptance and healing throughout time and space, including the here and now. I'm Gwyn Isaacs, a sex coach and educator, and I fully believe that you are sexy. Even if you aren't feeling it right now. My guest this week is Dustin M Wax, the director of the Burlesque Hall of Fame in Las Vegas.

We talk about the history of burlesque, how it came to be, what it is now, why burlesque is important, how gender plays out throughout that history, how the museum came to exist and so much more. You can visit the Burlesque Hall of Fame the next time you're in Las Vegas. It's in the Downtown Arts District and is well worth the time and cost to see these items in person.

I look forward to going back the next time I'm in town. The inspiration that came from my last visit was pretty big. The bonus for this episode is about how the committee chooses the performers for the Annual Tournament of Tease and Showcase that is the world renowned international burlesque competition held over a weekend in June every year. You can listen to that at the Patreon page for What Excites Us by clicking the link at whatexcitesus.com.

What's your path to becoming the director of the Burlesque Hall of Fame?

[00:01:39] Dustin: I'm an anthropologist. And was working out here teaching anthropology at CSN and Women's Studies over at UNLV as an adjunct. And I had always been interested in museums. I'd worked in a couple of museums and taken some museum studies in grad school. But when I came out here, there were only like four museums. And I was like, well, someone's gonna have to die before I can find a job in a museum.

But I met the former director in 2008 I guess, and she was like, you know, oh, you should really learn about burlesque. The stuff that you work on in, in gender studies, you know, you should really be interested in burlesque. And I was like, no, that's not a thing. Like burlesque, what is this 1936? Who cares about that anymore? And she's like, no, there's a huge neo burlesque movement. It's a very feminist, it's very much about sexual empowerment and bodily autonomy and all these things that I was teaching about and talking about all the time.

So she took me, to an event where I saw my first burlesque performer, and, she sort of introduced me to it a little bit. There was no museum at the time. They'd had a storm in California where it used to be uh, ripped the roof off of the old place and moved the collection out here in like, in a rush emergency and were without any space for four or five years.

But in 2010 she started working to open this little tiny space on Fremont Street. It was 220 square feet. It was in an art center that was a former medical center that they converted over. So we were in the nurse's station. It was this tiny little space, but it was supposed to be a little tease of what's to come,

[00:03:23] Gwyn: how appropiate.

[00:03:24] Dustin: And she contacted me cuz she knew I was interested in what she was doing, but she also knew I was interested in museums and asked if I wanted to help get the place set up. So I volunteered and started helping out. Once we opened, I started working like every other Saturday or something like that, just to, to hang out. We were only open like two days a week anyway.

Meanwhile someone didn't die, but someone did leave one of the museum positions. And I started working at the Barrick Museum at UNLV. And as I'm working there and kind of reactivating everything I know about museums, and I start looking at what we're doing at BHoF and I start thinking we could do this better. Cuz it was all amateurs, you know, it was all burlesque people, with no nonprofit training, no museum training. And as I started asking her to sort of take over more and more responsibilities she asked me to help her put together a plan like a five year plan.

And she was looking to leave the position in the first place cuz she kind of fell into it by accident when the storm hit. She was someone that had been really involved with the museum out in California, and in the midst of everything they needed someone to take the reins as it were. And so she ended up in that position and wanted to go back to her career.

Yeah, so I put this plan together and presented it. We had a big meeting of a bunch of stakeholders about 16 people here in Las Vegas. And I presented my plan and we talked about a bunch of other possibilities and what could happen. But at the end they decided, okay, let's take this plan, let's, appoint Dustin as the interim executive director, which I was working part-time.

I was officially working part-time, but basically I was working my other job full-time and working this job full-time plus and so after the next weekender, or you know, seven, eight months later, I was like. I need to be full-time. If I'm gonna do this job, it needs to be the only focus. And so the board agreed to that and I became the executive director.

So that was 2011 and yeah, five, six, well, three years later we signed the lease for this place, but it was seven years later that we opened in this space. So my five year plan takes seven years, but it wasn't really my fault. It was the, landlord bought the building and rented us the space. And then the building had foundation problems, had to be torn down and rebuilt from the bottom up and they dragged their heels on that and it took a couple extra years.

[00:05:58] Gwyn: Can you take us back and give us a brief history of burlesque for folks who don't really know Burlesque

[00:06:04] Dustin: Yeah. There's always been burlesque. As long as there's been theater, there's been burlesque. Burlesque is parody. It's taking the piss out of the people in power. So burlesque has traditionally been taking something, taking a story and exaggerating it to the point that it becomes grotesque, it becomes ridiculous.

You know, They used to write burlesque of plays and you'd take a play in the middle Ages or whatever, you know, the hero was always someone on a quest for the glory of God or whatever. And you say, no, they're on a quest because they're horny for the princess, they just want to get in the princess's skirt and make it just really exaggerated and, and through that, make fun of, the kings and the princes and the whatever, the rich businessmen.

And so in the late mid 18 hundreds. in the United States, we have a very strong theatric tradition, but not much of a burlesque tradition. And Lydia Thompson comes over with her British Blondes and creates this new kind of burlesque theater. This is still giant productions. It's scripted, but it's unique in that women are playing all the men's roles and dressing in kind of men's clothes.

They're dressing in men's suggesting male clothes but still with their legs exposed in tights, but still the shape of their legs exposed, the shape of their bodies exposed. And this kind of incredibly popular, and there's a bunch of copycat troops. Um, And pretty soon this kind of like parody becomes really common. It becomes a very popular form of entertainment. At the same time we have new dance trends developing in, particularly in black communities out of cakewalk dance. And we have the minstral show kind of dying out because minstral shows were more of a rural form of entertainment as we urbanize they're being replaced by vaudeville type variety shows.

But it's the same people running them, they're just moving the location and sort of stripping out the rural elements. And all those kind of crashed together in the early 19th century. So we get this kind of variety show. Sexy dancing, dancing girls singing girls little skits instead of big long plays. A lot of comedy, very working class.

And over the next 20 odd years stripping is illegal. You can't be nude on stage dancing around or whatever. But slowly People basically keep, pushing the envelope, pushing the envelope, pushing the envelope till by the end of the twenties. We do have sort of something we would see as modern strip teases.

And that happens just as talking movies come in and as radio becomes popular and both of those things pull all the comics away. All the comics go to work in Hollywood, or they go to work in radio stations. And so that makes the strip tease the, the core thing. And that's the birth of sort of what we recognize as modern burlesque.

And of course that gets a lot of impetus from the depression because it's cheap. It's a cheap form of entertainment. It gets a lot of impetus after World War II. As you know, millions of service members come home and have been exposed to other kinds of cultures and other kinds of erotic entertainments. And they also had the whole pinup culture that developed with the fronts of their planes and the pictures from home of, you know, models and whatnot to keep 'em company and they're, 5,000 miles away from home. And all of that kind of drives this forties, fifties, sixties period of really bump and grind strip tease. The Tempest Storm era, the Lil St. Cyr, Sally Rand era.

Meanwhile burlesque is being joined in the culture by other forms of entertainment that are also shocking at the time but become less so. The bikini becomes very popular. Pornographic movies become available and by the early seventies are mainstream. You know, you can go see Deep Throat at the same movie theater that's showing the Godfather uh, you have topless go-go dancing. So you have the envelope of decency that they were pushing ever wider and ever wider is now surpassed them. You can turn on the TV and watch Gidget running around a bikini, and it's just television.

And it starts looking a little quaint. The economics of it are changing. They're moving from big theaters to small theaters, to nightclubs, to basically bars. And burlesque as a form of live adult entertainment becomes the live nude girls strip club type entertainment. And that is its own art form, but it's not really burlesque anymore. It's not parody. It's not meant to be particularly funny. It's not meant to have big 15 minute long acts or elaborate costumes or whatever.

So burlesque goes into this kind of fallow period from the early seventies until the nineties. I, it's still out there. There's revival shows on Broadway. There's traveling shows that are doing old timey burlesque. There are feature dancers in the strip clubs that are still doing elaborate costumes and full acts and so on. But it's just less and less. Society kind of moved on.

But then in the nineties it gets rediscovered in a whole new generation of people. Predominantly young women at a time when there's all kinds of revival movements. There's rockabilly, there's roller derby, there's the Riot Girl movement in punk. There's all kinds of attempts to kind of mine our history for ways of being feminine or female in the world and sort of rehabilitating them and modernizing them, and feministizing them. And burlesque is one of them. And a bunch of people start rediscovering this, in pictures, in old magazines and maybe old uh, videotapes of old movies.

The Something Weird Collection starts putting out these VHS tapes of these old B movies, and some of 'em are, you know, like Teasearama or whatever. And it reemerges as kind of this cabaret art form, like a performance art form. And starts taking off again. And like I said, I, started getting into community in around 2010 and already then we'd been through like a couple of waves of neo burlesque expansion.

And I'd say since then, the burlesque world's probably quadrupled, if not more in size. You know, one of the things I've seen over the years is different countries discovering it. Like right now, this year we had a ton of applications from Italy. We had a few in 2020 the last time we did applications. There were just a couple, and then this year there were probably 10 times as many applications in Italy because they're, discovering it and, and they're, getting into it. Australia, you know, there was a big scene in Australia that developed and Japan, and and then it's taking on a different flavor and sort of each place where it gets rediscovered.

[00:13:43] Gwyn: Yeah. That's wonderful. So you mentioned women's empowerment. How does that fall into it how are people using, going to a show or being a performer to help themselves?

[00:13:56] Dustin: You know, we live in a world where women's bodies are monitored where women's sexuality is monitored, constantly, when there's certain things that are just simply unacceptable for women in the mainstream society.

And we unfortunately in a world where now a lot of governments have decided that they want to get directly into the policing that business. But we live in a world that also has radically changed in that women are now pretty much equal participants in the workforce. Not necessarily financially or power-wise, but numbers-wise there are very few single breadwinner households. You know, the Leave It To Beaver type dad is, gets up, goes to work, comes home, reads his paper, kind of households. Women are contributing in the workforce. They are lawyers and legislators and engineers and scientists and doctors and, you know, all these things that they were largely excluded from 50 years ago.

And yet their value is still tied to, are you following this very sort of impossible to follow guidebook of how you should look, how you should act, how you should experience your body, how you should relate to your sexuality, to your, sexual orientation, all that stuff. And I think that tension is a big part of what makes modern burlesque work. You know, the neo burlesque or why came back. But I think it's always been there. And burlesque has always offered women an opportunity to express themselves publicly, to be visible publicly

There are some women who have careers in burlesque, but a lot of more are, you know, they make a few dollars, like they make pin money from it. And by pin money, I mean the pins they have to use to build their costumes you know, it all goes back into their, into their burlesque world.

But if you go back to the 19th century and the 20th century, women were making a living. They had a career. They're traveling the world. They met presidents. And socialized with senators in kings and queens and princes and Hollywood royalty and rock stars. And, it opened up a world to people that they could not have experienced because of the limitations that were largely put on women in general. So they controlled their own careers, they controlled their own lives, they traveled.

Today, it's, as I said, there's this tension where women are supposed to be very much a part of the public life of the world, and yet they're also supposed to be restricted in a way that men wouldn't tolerate for a second. And I think burlesque gives them a way of pushing back against that, of saying, you know, I'm on this stage, my sexuality is my own. My gender is my own. The way I present myself is entirely my choice. I'm the aggressor. I'm not this passive, wallflower sitting in the corner of the room waiting for a man to pay attention to me.

I own how I look, how I appear how I take up space. And I think that is super empowering. That's super empowering for anyone, but it's super empowering for women in a society where they're so often told, don't take up space. just sit there and look pretty and don't insert yourself into the world anymore than you have to.

[00:17:26] Gwyn: Yeah. One of the things that I find really empowering about burlesque is the acceptance of bodies, is that all bodies are accepted. Which is not like everywhere else.

[00:17:37] Dustin: Right. and you know, we put on a whole showcase of older performers of the, pre 75 performers. And we work very hard to have that kind of representation in our own shows and our own events. People go to their first burlesque show and they're blown away by the fact that people that they wouldn't think that they would give a second look to, on the street are super sexy. And it's because of the way they own this space, because of the way they own their representation.

And it turns out it's not your physical form. It turns out it's not your age. It turns out it's not your hair color or the size of your breasts or the size of your hips or whatever that make you sexy, you know, that make you desirable. I mean, I don't want to just boil sexy down to being desirable to someone else but it's that internal part of it that confidence that people carry themselves with and the physical control that they exercise in creating these personas and creating these acts.

That's the main thing. And then it doesn't matter if you're, you know, a hundred pounds or 400 pounds, it doesn't matter if you're 22 or 82. I mean, we've had 82 year old women perform on our stage and tears streaming down people's faces because of just the beauty of this performance of this woman just masterfully occupying this stage and expressing herself and sharing herself.

[00:19:08] Gwyn: Yeah. That's, that touches me. So I took a um, how to burlesque class with indigo blue, and she really highlighted the art of the tease. And that, so much of that tension that draws people in comes from the art of the tease. And what I found as a person approaching this was that that also gave me confidence. It put my mindset into this piece as opposed to worrying about traditional beauty standards.

[00:19:37] Dustin: Yeah. And it turns out that the, tease parts is the dangerous part. When we look at our society the way the laws are often written, it's not about being naked. You can be naked, you can go to the Met and look at a hundred paintings of nude women, and that's art.

You can go look at statues and that's art. You can be naked. But in the same city where the Met is and the MoMA and the Whitney and all these art museums where you can see all these nude paintings, and I don't know if this is still the case, but when I lived there 20 years ago, the law was you couldn't remove a piece of clothing on stage. You had to go off stage, remove a piece of clothing, and then come back on.

And that's still the law in a lot of places where they have blue laws like Tennessee Kentucky like a lot of places in the south Massachusetts, they had very strict blue laws and you could do a costume change off stage, but you couldn't remove a piece of clothing on stage cuz that's filthy. And that's the tease, right? That's the strip part of it is, that's the art that you're leading someone to think terrible sinful thoughts, you know, basically by teasing them.

You could be a, a robot, you know, it could be just a teasing machine. If it had that impact, if it made people think these things, if people were drawn into it in this way, that it becomes a seduction, then it, it doesn't matter who the person is, what the physical thing is. It's, that slow buildup of tension , and anticipation

[00:21:15] Gwyn: I had no idea about that law that fascinates me. So I've lived in Vermont for the past 30 years, and um, you can be naked in completely naked. Mm-hmm. But you can't remove clothing. Because then it's lascivious.

[00:21:30] Dustin: There it is. It's such a weird thing but yeah, they couldn't outlaw nudity because of art.

[00:21:37] Gwyn: Right.

[00:21:38] Dustin: And you know, it's why, I mean, look, all of our decency laws are boiled down to does it look dirty when I look at it? Like, do I think it looks dirty? that's our law, right? That's community standards. That's, you know, appealing to a prurient interest. Well, who the hell knows what appeals to a prurient interest, Like one person might be you know, pantyhose might appeal to their prurient interest or, you know, certain kind of hairstyle or whatever might get someone going. Like these things are, it's why they're hard to enforce.

And you know, it's why, as we see these laws in Tennessee and Idaho, wherever else you know, they attack burlesque. The news all about drag, but they all include burlesque. They're all including sexualized performance of any kind. And as we see these, kinds of attacks, on the one hand it's like, well, this is frustrating cuz it expresses a road we'd rather not go down, basically.

But on the other hand, none of these laws are enforceable. Because time after time courts have found these kinds of blanket decency laws don't apply because we have the right to express ourselves. You know? And I don't know, I mean, maybe the court gets so conservative that we no longer have the right to express ourselves.

In which case I think we have bigger issues than whether or not you can take your clothes off in public. But traditionally that's, been fine. And so they, they have to find like technical things rather than she's just nude. All over the country, breastfeeding is protected.

But then you know, you go to a burlesque show and someone pops a pasty and all of a sudden you could lose your liquor license. You know, the club could lose their liquor license for that. So, they're always trying to find these technical ways to define something that's not really definable.

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So, in the past, I don't know, decade or so, there's been more gender inclusiveness with bearlesque and, and theylesque

[00:25:21] Dustin: mmm hmm

[00:25:23] Gwyn: how is that playing out in your world in the Hall of Fame reality?

[00:25:27] Dustin: Well, the big thing this year is that we just eliminated our Boylesque category and incorporated everything. We have a best debut in Miss Exotic World are now genderless categories, so it's still best debut and then it'll be. The winner will be the miss Mr. Ms, or Mx exotic world. And we'll leave that up to them to decide. It's funny because it's something that, you know in the neo burlesque movement, like there weren't a lot of men.

And so they created this best boy less category kind of on the fly in 2006 because some guys applied and they had no idea what to do with them. So they were like, let's make a boys category. And then 10 years later we had an applicant who was a female bodied person, someone who lives as a woman. It's not a trans person, not a agender person, but presented themselves to us saying, look, my, my work is boylesque.

Like, my character is a boylesque character. It's not a female burlesque queen type character. And he was like, all right, well, I'm not gonna police the gender of people entering our competition. Like, we're not gonna make people drop their trousers or whatever, like, which they want to do in a lot of places when you go in the bathroom,

[00:26:50] Gwyn: right

[00:26:50] Dustin: So I, I'm like, but we we're not gonna do that. So, apply to whatever feels comfortable to you. And that triggered like, well, why do we even have this category? And it took a long time to kind of work out what to do with that.

[00:27:05] Gwyn: Yeah.

[00:27:06] Dustin: And a lot of people oppose it. A lot of people are worried that there's a lot of gender essentialism. There's a lot of people worried that men are just inherently physically stronger and able to do more physically demanding performances, and that that means they're gonna automatically win.

Although that's, I think, a couple of leaps, but the leap from physically demanding to winning is, I think not necessarily in evidence. And there's a lot of people on the flip side that want to see 20 categories. Like you should have more categories for more genders. I don't like that. I feel like that's sort of separate but equal sort of thinking.

But yeah, there's a lot of opposition that, I mean, there's more support than opposition, but there's a lot more people than I thought there were in the burlesque community that had a lot of things to say about mixing and genders. And then there's, there's people who just are like burlesque women's art form.

And men, men should be held separately as guests in this world. Which is fine. and I, I actually feel that way to some extent. But we don't have men. We have this whole rainbow of, of gender expressions that are between what you might categorize as the women who's art form this is, and men and I don't know where to put them.

so that's been a big impact for us. I mean, here in the museum, of course, we have gotten better and better at sussing out these stories. They're hard because people in like the fifties who might have not felt very comfortable with their gender assignment in the world didn't have a lot of options. As it turns out, several of the earliest sex change operations were people in the burlesque world or they end up in the burlesque. Even Christine Jorgenson ends up in the burlesque world because it's a world where you can make your body the focus of attention and in a way that is profitable.

[00:29:11] Gwyn: Right.

[00:29:11] Dustin: So for someone who very famously was nonconforming with the gender and norms of the time, there was a world where they could still have make a living. Jennifer Fox, whose picture we have there, she's the third one over from the right. She billed herself as the, isn't he or isn't she girl? And was like the second or third trans people, Hedy Jo Star.

I, keep saying trans, like there's trans without operations, but people who had sex reassignment surgery. Hedy Jo Star was also one of the earliest. And actually her nephew wrote a book trying to make the case that she was the earliest, that actually she started before Christine Jorgenson and should get that sort of billing. I don't know what he thinks he's gonna get out of that change to the history from being like first to third or whatever. But yeah, those are stories we're really trying to tell. There's a lot of drag that we're starting to, discover how that fit. Cuz drag and burlesque were parallel.

They didn't really overlap a lot, but we're now starting to tease out some of the people that were doing drag acts within the burlesque world and trying to share that information. So we're, we're actually working on a whole series social media post. It's like one a month for the, for a year to highlight some of those stories.

And yeah, it's just making us look at, all these stories a lot more closely. Maybe it's also allowing people to come out more. I mean, one of the big things a few years back was uh, when Marika published her autobiography and came out as being a trans person. You know, I mean, there's other people in the burlesque world, other performers from her generation who probably are, but to come out and be like, I want this out there in the world meant so much to so many people.

I We have gender committee that was working on that issue of how do we combine these categories and is fairly diverse gender wise. And yeah with Marinka, they were like, oh, we've gotta do stuff about this. Someone wrote this whole essay for us to post So yeah, it's a big part of burlesque, you know, it's already burlesque already, you know, I think our audience survey our attendees are like 33% gay or bisexual, which is like yeah, I mean, it's way out way outsized in comparisons to the regular, the mainstream population at hand. So that's always been, you know, part of it.

And that gender play has always been going all the way back to Lydia Thompson dressing up as a wood cutter, as you know, Swiss Family Robinson, and, playing the male parts. Or Aida Overton Walker, who was a early cakewalk dancer when her husband died. They had a contract she just put on his clothes and did his part to play out his contract. So, I mean, there's a lot of that going all the way back. And like I said, that's one of the things that hit so hard about burlesque in the 19th century.

[00:32:17] Gwyn: So, switching focus to this beautiful museum, do you have changing exhibits and like a solid exhibit, like a standard museum sort of thing?

[00:32:26] Dustin: We do. So the, the exhibit, you can hear someone giving a tour. The exhibit that they're giving them a tour through is our permanent exhibit. That's a timeline of burlesque in the United States from the 1860s up to the present. That is sort of that side of the museum.

And that doesn't change. We're sitting in our studio, there's two exhibits up on the wall that don't change. One is about sort of some of these feminist ideals that we talked about and how they can be seen throughout burlesque history. The other one is sort of how to do these moves in burlesque. And then on the other side of this wall, which we can't see from where we're sitting we have our temporary exhibit space.

We are currently just finishing, putting a finishing touches on an exhibit called Built to Bear the art of Designing Clothes Engineered To Come Off. And so we're looking at designers in the burlesque world and we have a bunch of them. We have Hedy Jo Starr, who I just talked about is one of these transformers. We have Tony Midnite, who was a very famous costume designer and drag performer. We have some contemporary designers. We have some designers going back to the 1950s. And looking at, we have sketches of work in progress and performers, photos of performers being fitted for their costumes.

So that one's really about that. The this one's replacing a one that we had up last year for like nine months last year. That was on Asian performers, Asian, Asian American performers in burlesque. So we're constantly rotating. It's not quite one a year. It's a little more than one a year. It's like every nine months we're rotating that space over.

And then you can see this dress over here. That little nook, that little one meter by one meter space is sort of a micro gallery just for spotlighting a recent acquisition or a single person. When Tempest Storm passed away, we did a little thing. This one is for Lana Wong who just passed away. So we're just highlighting their particular career. And we just rotate, something new into that space every so often, every few months.

[00:34:37] Gwyn: That makes sense. Are people donating their family's stuff? how are you getting your materials?

[00:34:43] Dustin: Yeah, so this collection, uh, has a lot of history. So Jennie Lee, who started the museum, she actually started in the fifties a union, the Exotic Dancers League for exotic dancers primarily based in Los Angeles.

It was part of the American Guild of Variety Artists. In the sixties she became popular with the American Guild of Variety Artists because those LA clubs were the only ones that weren't dominated by the mob. And they got in a lot of trouble for that for being, representing these performers and charging them dues and then letting them mob prostitute them out, basically.

But in LA that wasn't happening. So she became, a powerful figure in American Guild of Variety Artists. So when that happened, they no longer had to be a union and became more of a social network, social club. And in 1965 for their annual meeting, she says, bring me your costumes. Let's start a Burlesque Hall of Fame.

So that starts the collection, which she displayed in her bar, the Sassy Lassy for many years. When that closed she displayed in her home for a while. And then she moved out to the desert in California in Hellendale, California in the eighties. And took over this goat ranch with the idea of she's gonna have a dancing school, she's gonna have a museum, she's gonna have a place for retired performers to come and bring their trailers or their mobile homes and live.

And it's gonna be like this little hippie stripper commune in the middle nowhere. So her collection is growing by people giving her stuff. She passed away in 1990. Dixie Evans, her friend, takes over. Also a performer from the fifties. And. Again, people are giving your stuff towards the end of the nineties, of course, when we start having like eBay.

So she purchases some things. She purchased a big chunk of Liz Renee's estate. She purchased stuff off of eBay, but mostly people are just donating stuff. And when I took over and, well, when my predecessor Laura Herbert took over, same thing. When I took over same thing. Like we have this big weekend event.

, you know, I used to say like, I have the only job in the world where like an 80 year old woman would walk up to me and give me naked pictures of herself. But that's what would happen is these performers would come, they'd give me their photos, their costumes.

We regularly will have a younger adult whose grandmother or mother passes away and they're going through their house and they find a bunch of stuff and they're like, holy crap.

Grandma was a burlesque dancer in like 1949 to 1954. What?!

And they will send us this stuff cuz they don't really know what to do with it. And they want it to be somewhere. We regularly have performers who'll come in and just give us a bunch of their stuff. You know, we watch auctions. We can't afford anything at auction, but we watch auctions, we watch eBay pick up photos, and sometimes a costume piece or something from eBay. But largely, yeah, it's donated. Like I'd see probably 80% is, donated to us.

We just had a performer come in last week and bring us a whole stack of photos of her friends, basically from her career and, stacks of, I don't know, 40 or 50, pretty big stars. All of them signed, you know, to her all thanks for whatever, or whatever, you know, all of them inscribed to her she's just wanted her collection of being a, in a safe place and to contribute to posterity.

[00:38:24] Gwyn: Are you also the archivist or do you have

[00:38:27] Dustin: We have a curator. So when I started I was the whole cast and crew. The event is put on, the weekender is put on by all volunteers aside from me. Our museum is staffed right now by three full-time people, aside from me to have a curator and a program manager.

And and then Jeffry is the one you hear giving the tour uh, as a museum assistant or the most recent person. They've been here for two years I guess in next month. Yeah, so we've gradually, but like when I started, the collection was all in storage and was just inaccessible. It was impossible to work with. So being able to have our collection on site means that we can have a person whose job it is to take care of the collection and. And work on and put exhibitions together and,

[00:39:17] Gwyn: yeah.

[00:39:18] Dustin: Yeah. So,

[00:39:19] Gwyn: yeah. So I, I, I've just so I, I've done some archival work and the idea of trying to keep this collection safe and, you know, secure and making and, and making it available occasionally like that, it, it feels really daunting

and

[00:39:37] Dustin: it was never cataloged. And so we're still, we've got like a third of it cataloged at this point. we're still working on this. It's gonna be another 10 years before

[00:39:47] Gwyn: it's

[00:39:47] Dustin: cataloged.

[00:39:47] Gwyn: Sure. And then people keep bringing you more stuff.

[00:39:50] Dustin: and people keep bringing more stuff. But a lot of it is really damaged beyond being displayable because the conditions in Helendale. They were not taken care of by professionals. Stuff was on a mannequin for 10 years, which is bad. They had really bad dust cause they're out the middle of the desert. They didn't have museum grade filtration, People were touching stuff. There were rodents. There were, like, the floors were dirt in a lot of places, and they just laid down AstroTurf over it or carpet over

[00:40:23] Gwyn: it Yeah.

[00:40:24] Dustin: and, you know, but you still have dust coming up pests, all this stuff.

That, and kind of loosey-goosey rules, like right. People putting stuff on, oh, I wanna try this on. Let's see how that looks on me. So that's been a big focus for us is making sure that the stuff that can be saved is saved and preserved the best possible way. Everything's evaluated to see can it be on here for another three months or whatever. This is why I was brought in cuz I was someone with museum experience

[00:40:56] Gwyn: and

[00:40:56] Dustin: non-profit experience and we needed to professionalize, or the collection wasn't gonna make it another, you know, 50 years.

[00:41:05] Gwyn: And

[00:41:06] Dustin: we want to be able to keep sharing this story and tell people, you know, 20 years from now, 30 years from now, what was going on in the nineties and aughts. You know, we want to be here to record the contemporary generation stories as they start retiring. And so that we have those costumes and everything. And if we can't take care of stuff then that the story's just gonna go away.

[00:41:31] Gwyn: Right. Well, thank you for doing this work. it's so important. if somebody came to you and asked, how do I even begin to approach burlesque? Like what, what would you say to them?

[00:41:42] Dustin: We have a burlesque 101 class. We offer twice a year, every town has a burlesque studio. Every major city, I should say, has a burlesque studio that teaches a intro to burlesque class. You find your local shows, you talk to the people there. if there's not a school that you can go to, there's gonna be someone that is gonna be willing to give you classes individually I mean you can find that material.

If you can't, if you're in dirt farm Nebraska, and you're a three hour drive from the nearest place where burlesque happens. You know, you do it the way they did in the nineties. Like, I mean, at least we have YouTube now, which they didn't have. You go to the burlesque called Fame Vimeo

[00:42:30] Gwyn: Channel,

[00:42:31] Dustin: and you can see all the performances for the last, like 10 years from our festival. You get Joe Weldon's burlesque handbook and you, you know, you like the Karate kid with his magazine, you know, learning.

Just do it in your living room until you feel comfortable and then find somewhere to put it on stage. The first people who did, you know, the first Neo burlesque people, a lot of them didn't realize they were doing burlesque. They just thought like, I'm doing this act and it would be really cool if I took my shirt off here or whatever. And then found out later that they were doing something that has this

[00:43:11] Gwyn: history.

[00:43:12] Dustin: So maybe that's you, but I think for most people, they live in a city. You live in Chicago or Oklahoma City, or Dallas or New Orleans, or boston or wherever. Memphis. And there are we people who will teach you and go to shows and just see what people do. I we do a show, we do a quarterly show roughly quarterly. The next one's April 15th. and we specifically target, sort of the non burlesque audience. We want people who are just open to new, different kind of of show.

Um, And we get a lot of newcomers, every show, you know, something the MC likes to ask like, how many people is this your first show? And we get a a lot. Less and less as the show gets a following and you know, more repeat people are coming, but we still get a lot of people and you know, know, so always like, well, welcome to your first show. This isn't gonna be your last show, and we'll see some of you on stage pretty soon. You know, because it just has that impact. Like once people start watching it, they wanna do it. Who doesn't want to be like these amazing, sparkly, angels descending onto the stage who are so confident and so, you know themselves without any fear. And so yeah, you go to the shows and learn.

I mean, there's a long tradition of kids learning how to play, their guitar in their room, by themselves. If that's what you have to do, that's what you have to do. But if you can there's plenty of people that are available to train you.

And it's, I mean, it's not free classes at Michael's cheap, but it's not expensive. It's, you know taking courses at the university extension expensive.

[00:45:03] Gwyn: than welcome

Am I missing anything or are there things that I haven't asked you that you want to be sure to talk about?

[00:45:09] Dustin: ya know, Come to museum, check out what we do and check out the story. you know, we give a tour. As you walk through the museum, you'll see very few things have like labels on each thing. Cuz we have a small space we wanna maximize how much stuff we could show.

But also Burlesque comes to us through stories. Like no one thought this stuff was important. No one ever thought anyone would want to know these stories. And so it didn't get preserved very

[00:45:36] Gwyn: well.

[00:45:38] Dustin: You know, it's space race. There's 15,000 books about it. Every astronaut's written a book or ghost written a book. Every person who's the head of mission control area, like everyone wrote a book cuz they all knew that this was important and needs to be preserved for history.

Well, burlesque not so much. People thought it was dismissable, it's frivolous, it's not

[00:45:58] Gwyn: important.

[00:45:59] Dustin: And so how it came to us was from stories that people told about their own careers. Oh, let me tell you about, the time

[00:46:07] Gwyn: I met,

[00:46:07] Dustin: Tempest Storm and we were in their first show together and blah, blah, blah or whatever.

So we've wanted to build an experience around telling stories and Everyone thinks they don't want to tour at a museum. Everyone thinks they don't want to be bothered. And they do. For every hundred five star reviews we get for our tours, we like one person complaining they didn't like it like minuscule. And we really try to make this an experience that people are gonna enjoy and have fun with. And, hear stories.

[00:46:40] Gwyn: Yeah. storytelling is so important. It's what makes our culture any culture, every culture. And I

[00:46:46] Dustin: I just couldn't see having a museum where you'd have a picture of Sherry Britton who I think may have been the most beautiful person to ever walk on the face of the earth and have a little tag. Next to it just said, Sherry Britton circa 1934. We don't want that. We wanted to tell you the story of this person and let you into their their lives a little bit

[00:47:06] Gwyn: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So I like to end my interviews by asking you, Dustin, what excites you

[00:47:14] Dustin: What excites me? I mean, I love what I do. I mean, I love that I get to have this. this is how I express myself, like I'm not a

[00:47:22] Gwyn: dancer.

[00:47:23] Dustin: I became an anthropologist because I want to tell people stories and I got into museums because I want to tell people stories, and I could tell stories about people that were super brave and super resilient and challenge the social norms they lived in. And I think provide incredible, amazing, important lessons that apply to us today.

You know, when Trump was elected, and this burlesque community is very women centric, obviously. And women were just like this sexist guy is now the president of the United States. And it was super depressing and all I, I was like, but I have this place. And what we do is directly contrary to that, that like we challenge that every day. And so I don't have to change anything I'm doing and just keep, doing what I'm doing and challenging those narratives. I'm super, super glad I get today.

this. I didn't think I was gonna be a museum director. I was gonna be an anthropologist who taught classes and then worked with a museum to put on exhibitions about the, Pueblo pottery or whatever, you know, every so often. Instead, I'm a museum director who teaches, you know, one class each semester, you know, every so often. So it's amazing.

[00:48:46] Gwyn: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much. This has been delightful. I'm really excited about it

sorry about the sound quality for the last part of that recording, but that's what happens when you are recording in a public place. If you enjoy this show, please take a minute to rate and review on all the podcast apps that do that. Apple, Spotify, and a couple others I think accept them. I know you hear it from all your podcasts, but it really, really, really does help go a long way towards getting this show in more ears by raising the rating of this show in the apps that are listening to it. And if you can help out at all, just that moment of time goes so far. Really, really, really thank you so much. I am assuming that you are already subscribed, but if you're not, please do that too.

So if you have things that you would like to say to me, make this a conversation and not just me chatting in your earways, you can do so by heading over to whatexcitesus.com there's a button that says, talk to me. I think maybe it says SpeakPipe. I don't remember right now. It's been a long couple of days. Anyhow, whatexcitesus.com is where you can find all of the past episodes the affiliate links for the lube. You can talk to me, you can pitch me a story. You can tell me you wanna be interviewed. You can just tell me you don't like it. Whatever you want, whatexcitesus.com. I really would love to hear from you unless you have something nasty to say then I mean, really nobody wants to hear that, but if you feel so inclined, go ahead. whatexcitesus.com.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah, that's, this is how this is, it's been a, it's really, it's been a couple of days of, oh my gosh, perimenopause, fun. Anywho, What Excites Us is produced, edited, and hosted by me Gwyn Isaacs, our podcast host is Tickle.Life. All of the music used is with the Creative Commons attribution license because music is important people.

The opening song is by Stephen Kartenberg and Julius H recorded this last piece. I appreciate you. I appreciate you listening. And you are loved, and I can say that with certainty because I love you