It’s Saturday night at Lili’s Burlesque Revue, and Sweetpea is center stage, vibrating her derriere like a paint shaker at Home Depot. The diminutive brunette’s dance routine is a combination of kooky showmanship and gymnastic prowess. Arriving onstage in a frumpy 1950s housecoat, bath cap, and cat’s-eye specs, she peels off the Grandma outfit layer by layer while giving a Hula-Hoop the hip-swinging ride of its life. The near-capacity crowd, about sixty men and women, yowl and applaud as she puts the hoop into overdrive.
Tawnya Konobeck, who performs as the dorky/sexy Sweetpea, is part of a new generation trying to revive the sass, the glamour, and the art of the old-fashioned strip tease. Lili’s troupe of a dozen or so regulars might each bring home thirty dollars a night, which of course barely keeps them in sequins and pasties. With that kind of financial reward, this is hardly a case of women exploiting their bodies for money. Laura Libby, stage name Ophelia Flame, is a veteran of the Twin Cities exotic dancing scene. She told me that she could easily make a thousand dollars a night by taking off a bit more and doing a lot less work, but she’s drawn to the girls’-club atmosphere of the cabaret.
“It’s less expensive to perform at Lili’s than for us to go out. We get all dressed up, go downtown, have a few cocktails with our friends, do a couple of numbers and go home. We get to wear fake eyelashes, be the center of attention, and still walk home with money in our pockets” after a night of fun, she explained. “Although I’d be lying if I said we wouldn’t be happy to make more, I think it’s healthy to have a hobby that isn’t purely motivated by filling your pockets.”
“Why do any other kind of labor but a labor of love?” chimed in Michelle Langer, a Gustavus Adolphus music grad and erstwhile Christian rocker who becomes Nadine DuBois, the revue’s sultry emcee. “I would have done this gig for free. What I do every weekend is get all dressed up and fabulous, sing fantastic songs, watch my friends perform their hearts out, hang out with lovely people in the audience, and feel awesome about who I am as a woman in her sexuality. Seriously, what’s better than that?”
In this age of Internet sleaze and primetime wardrobe malfunctions, the show has an innocent, PG-13 feel. Nipples remain chastely covered at all times and panties are de rigueur. You see more flesh exposed at the gym. While the striptease has stimulated much conversation, Lili’s is a variety show, mixing bawdy comedy, clowning, mildly suggestive dancing, and music. By definition, burlesque is good humored. Libby, who calls herself “the June Cleaver of strippers,” does an act called “Laundromat Blues” with a prop washing machine that tumbles clothes and blows bubbles. A winter favorite is “The Minnesota Striptease,” in which she removes endless layers of long underwear and flannel, finally hiding her bare bosom behind a tater tot casserole and hot pads.
If Lili’s is the Land of Peekaboo, it is surrounded by the World of Spread’em—otherwise known as the Warehouse District. There are numerous bada-bing variants in the neighborhood; you could shoot a garter down the street to Sex World or Choice. Unlike some cities, Minneapolis makes no liquor-licensing distinction between establishments featuring full nudity and more discreet enterprises. But there is probably not a lot of crossover in the clientele. The audiences that choose Lili’s conceptual, stylized titillation want “a bit of naughty fun delivered with a wink and a smile,” said house pianist Karen Paurus. As burlesque queen Ann Corio observed decades ago, “A woman’s greatest asset is a man’s imagination.”
From its opening last August through May, the annex next to the Urban Wildlife bar was called Le Cirque Rouge de Gus. It took a new name in honor of Lili St. Cyr (born Willis Marie Van Schaack in Minneapolis on June 3, 1918), a very popular stripper in the 1950s famed for her champagne bubble-bath routine. There was also a change of management after an acrimonious split between most of the performers and founder Amy Buchanan. When I spoke to the troupe, the ousted Buchanan was threatening legal action, but the mood was upbeat and crowds were growing.
They are not stereotypical strip-club patrons. “We get a lot of woman coming down—perhaps more woman than men,” observed Patrick Tierney, who performs blues classics under the moniker “The Dusty Balladeer.” “Tons of couples. They not only adore the dancers, they sing along to the songs, they laugh at the jokes, they cheer for the jugglers.”
“I think people are drawn to simpler times when life gets scary and feels unstable,” theorized Libby. “There’s safety in looking to the past, remembering and seeing, ‘Okay, they made it through that. We can do this.’ ”
She is probably onto something. As historian Irving Zeidman put it in his 1967 book, The American Burlesque Show, “burlesque thrives on depression.” Gina Woods, a Macalester College Dance Ensemble alum who performs as Gina Louise, thinks the form is timeless. “Women have been doing this dance since the dawn of fabric,” she said.
With venues emerging in New York, Las Vegas, New Orleans, and San Francisco, the revival appears to be swelling. The second annual New York Burlesque Festival, held in May, had one hundred and fifty performers—three times as many as last year—and a few corporations, such as Target and Bloomberg LP, have hired burlesque artists for private events.
Langer isn’t surprised. “People who choose to see a burlesque show are looking for something different and more fabulous than what they usually do,” she said. “I knew a guy who came to our show, and then went to one of those more explicit clubs up the street. He said, ‘Damn. I spent a lot more money there, but your show was way sexier.’” —Colin Covert
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