The Least Interesting Burlesque Dancer: On Writing About Me
photo credit: Greg Inda
I’m not that interesting.
For the twelve years I’ve called myself a writer, this has been my refrain, along with is this the final draft or the final FINAL draft? and I got rejected yet again, time to call Dominos for cheesy bread.
I’m a cis white gal who grew up in a farm town, moved to the big city for college and basically never left. I hold down a corporate 9-to-5 job, which keeps my lights on when writing doesn’t. I have never been addicted to heroin. I am the opposite of “not like other girls”—I am other girls.
There’s one interesting thing, but I told myself I was the last person who should write about it.
For a decade, I was a burlesque dancer. For seven of those years, I was a professional burlesque dancer. For four of those years, I bared it all two nights a week in up to four different shows with names like Temple of Boobs and Game of Thongs.
But everyone gets weird in their thirties, right?
I’m just not a writer, I told myself in my twenties. Though I formally studied acting and law—and communications and women’s studies and dance—I never studied writing at a university. I preferred pink over black, and I didn’t know what the hell “bird by bird” meant. Until one day, I did.
I’m just not a burlesque dancer, I told myself in my early thirties. Sure, I spent two nights a week and most of my disposable income at a tiny studio in Chicago’s West Loop, learning to twirl a hot pink boa to Eartha Kitt’s cover of “Let’s Misbehave” without tripping over my high heels. I even participated in student shows at various local bars, dancing down to pasties and a G-string, but only in the safety of group numbers. I didn’t make up my own acts or go on auditions. Until one day I did.
My experience with writing was similar. In April 2007, I started writing. I woke up in the apartment I shared with my best friend on Chicago’s North Side, rolled over on my second-hand mattress with no frame, and banged out a short story on my laptop in one sitting. The story became a novel, and the novel wasn’t very good. But it was a start.
In July 2010, on the eve of my thirtieth birthday, I took my first burlesque class. I think we learned how to walk in heels. I wasn’t very good. But it was a start.
In many ways, writing and burlesque worked in parallel for me: tiny steps (sometimes in high heels), a shitload of trial and error, and constantly looking over my shoulder, fearing disapproval. In writing and in burlesque, I had to learn to tell my fears to fuck off and make the tiny steps bigger. Sometimes, I had to put myself out there in a way that scared me.
On a stormy night in April 2013, I left Rebecca Makkai’s Novel in a Year workshop–a select program with an acclaimed author that scared me a lot; it was like wearing a sign that said I AM SERIOUS ABOUT WRITING–for a tiny theater in Chicago’s Bucktown neighborhood. I crammed in a teeny lobby with twenty scantily-clad women while I filled out the audition form against a wall. I almost lost my thong during the striptease part of the tryout. The next morning, I was cast in an Indiana Jones nerdlesque show, Friday nights at 10:30. My first rehearsal was the following week.
“Nerdlesque” is a specific subset of burlesque—while “classic” is the feather boa and waa-waa gyrating you see in the movies, and “neo” is a form constantly up for debate, “nerdlesque” is their dorky little sister who watches too much Star Trek and knows there’s something sexy about that. While nerdlesque can be everything from solo numbers about an American Horror Story character to anime-themed cabarets, this troupe specialized in one-hour shows. Think an elongated Saturday Night Live parody, only with dance numbers and tits.
I worked my way up from “sexy red line on the map” in Temple of Boobs to sexy-punny old-school Batman villain Egghead in Holy Bouncing Boobies! to sexy lead Ewok in Boobs on Endor: A Return of the Jedi Burlesque to the coveted sexy Han Solo track in the troupe’s most popular show, A Nude Hope. Multiple shows ran in rep on Friday and Saturday nights. There were years I did four different performances a weekend: blowing in for my half-hour call at 8:30, slapping on red Nyx lipstick and too much Maybelline mascara, and setting up my various lingerie pieces on folding chairs for quick changes. I’d shake it at the theater from nine to midnight, then Uber home, pocket full of dollar bills from each show’s “tip get” and nipples slowly losing all feeling from pastie tape (usually wig or medical tape, to avoid the legendary and illegal “pasty pop”). At home, I’d scrub off my makeup, eat Cheez-Its in my pajama pants, and pass out, getting multicolored glitter all over my sheets because that shit never goes away.
But that’s not interesting, right?
I was never the biggest star. I never got booked in Vegas, or New York, or even Wisconsin. I was just Emma Glitterbomb, a perfectly serviceable stripper with big blonde hair and bigger tits. I hit my cues, wasn’t a jerk backstage, and could be counted on to come in last minute to fill in for a show. I did my thing and did it well enough.
Same with writing.
Over my decade of burlesque—nerdlesque, neo, and classic—my writing career began to progress. When I wasn’t at my 9-to-5, or shimmying on Saturdays in a red thong, black shitkicker boots and pasties shaped like the Millennium Falcon spacecraft, or Ubering around town to perform a sequin-gown solo act in my friend’s bar show in exchange for free drinks, I was scribbling and typing in the backstage dressing area that was actually a converted garage (freezing as fuck in winter and humid as fuck in summer).
After almost four years in the nerdlesque troupe, dozens of rejections for everything from one-sentences pitches to entire manuscripts, and half-finished drafts that went nowhere, my first short story was published. I signed a contract for my debut novel the same year. My sisters in sparkle came to book events and had me autograph their paperbacks at rehearsal. One night, another dancer talked up my book to a patron and he pulled up Amazon on his phone right then, had me press the “Buy Now” button after I removed my satin glove.
However, I was writing and publishing fiction. Sometimes that fiction was inspired by my fling with a coworker at a previous job or my seventeen years of Catholic school, but it was largely made up. Very occasionally, I’d publish a little essay on burlesque and body image—a thousand words at most, always under my stage name. Inventing characters and situations, reimagining a one-night stand or Shakespearean tragedy through the eyes of a teenager in 1997; that’s where I lived as a writer, then an author.
“No one wants to hear me talk about burlesque,” I’d proclaim, while applying for an MFA program with an essay about the night the actress playing Chewbacca knocked into me onstage. This accidental bonking resulted in my bloody nose mopped up with paper towels between scenes, and the reason Han Solo did the rest of the show without a shirt.
I may be an ex-stripper—but again, I’m boring. No visible tattoos, no traumatic childhood. I’m bi, but the worst I’ve faced is phobia, not bashing. Who wants to hear about a fringe art form from a person who’s had every advantage, and in most respects, continues to?
Also? Writing about burlesque is weird.
The usual strangeness of penning one’s nudity aside, there’s the arc itself. Burlesque narratives often fall into one of two categories: empowerment, or exploitation. Rare is the memoir I’ve read where both exist. Melissa Febos’s Whip Smart is the grandmommy, but even that’s a story of sex work, not burlesque, and I am no Melissa Febos.
How, I ask myself, do I tell my stories?
At the same time, I can’t stop thinking about burlesque, and writing about it, or at least trying. I can’t stop conjuring memories of the garage-cum-dressing room’s concrete floor covered with donated carpet, the first time I ripped off pastie tape and didn’t want to howl in pain, the time I had sex in a purple bra and thong and less than two hours later, hosted a superhero-themed cabaret in the same set, now with a red handprint on my pale ass. I can’t stop doubting myself, but I can’t stop reflecting on every sequin and processing every speck of glitter and sweaty dollar bill.
To me, burlesque is empowerment, exploitation, and everything in between.
I was empowered: I performed at a bachelorette party, taught 15 drunk women to shimmy in an apartment way nicer than my own, and had them all begging to be my best friend as they threw me twenties. I crowded backstage with drag queens at a ‘90s-themed show before bursting out to strip down to my Doc Martens as a tribute band played Counting Crows’ cover of “Mr. Jones.” If you don’t count the typical phobias of a queer woman living in this discriminatory society, I became fearless.
Even the most mediocre burlesquer sees some shit. I’ve been groped in bar back rooms and hallways above restaurants. (No, Mr. Manager, your hand did not “just slip” and land squarely on my bare ass cheek.) I’ve chased down minimal payment from a show that cost me way more in costume pieces and cab fare, only to finally give up when the producer ignored my third email and subsequently disappeared from Facebook. In one of Emma Glitterbomb’s lowest moments, I faced off against the screams of a gaslighting male producer as, through tears, I tried to quit his troupe. He “fired” me the next day.
I’m not that interesting was what I told myself until one day in February 2020 when I did topless splits at a Mardi Gras party before bellying up to the bar for complimentary chicken fingers (I will always accept complimentary chicken fingers.). Thanks to COVID and a few other factors—I was under contract for my second novel, my writing projects had ramped up, and really, I just felt done—those were Emma Glitterbomb’s final topless splits.
Two years later, I was in a writing workshop in Paris and had to submit a piece for the group. I wondered, for the first time, if “interesting” was really all that essential. I thought about the memoirs I’d loved —how to me, Joyce Maynard’s stories of her childhood in New Hampshire, her troubled academic parents and her obsession with Leave It to Beaver were just as fascinating to me as her teenage relationship with J.D. Salinger, maybe even more so. I started thinking. Maybe now that I’m done, it’s time to write down my stories from this strange, complex and wonderful world. Maybe recreating my memories will help me sort through my decade of glitter. Maybe, it’s okay if my stories are only for me.
I’d just taken a class from Chloe Caldwell, the Paris workshop’s instructor, whose writing I’d discovered during lockdown. In fact, my fiction-author ass had applied to the nonfiction cohort specifically to work with her. Chloe had everyone attempt an essay with time stamps. I thought about my years in nerdlesque, how everything from applying Maybelline to trying not to trip on the backstage ramp before curtain call to munching backstage burritos in the nude—the mundane details that make up a glittery life—embodied the Hedwig and the Angry Inch lyric, “and the strangest things seem suddenly routine.”
I’m not that interesting, I thought even as I revised and reedited, and three months later, held my breath in the conference room of a hotel in the Left Bank as my essay was up for workshop.
Everyone loved it.
“I didn’t know ‘nerdlesque’ was a word, let alone a whole culture!”
“I read this, and I wanted to know you.”
“I could picture it all: backstage, glitter and you yelling ‘I’m here, bitches!’”
Through the love and constructive criticism, I fixated on my own mental block.
“I shouldn’t tell this story,” I told the all-female, all-fabulous cohort.
“Why not?” they screamed at me.
I launched into a bullshit explanation: privilege, lack of trauma, et cetera. If anyone wants to read burlesque stories, I said, they’re sure as hell not going to want to read mine, which is the impression I’ve gotten from many in the burlesque community, more than once. (Burlesque folks are, on the whole, wonderfully supportive. But in any field, there are gatekeepers, and I’ve woken up to more than one vaguebook because some bitch didn’t like my shoes.)
And beyond I’m not that interesting, I realized, was the age-old question, the one I’d fought against since childhood but found its way into my subconscious nonetheless, quite possibly the reason I left writing workshop on a stormy night to doff my clothes in front of strangers:
What will people think?
And beyond that, what if they don’t like me?
“Okay,” Chloe said, interrupting the cacophony of encouragement and my sputtering protests. “Stop thinking for a second about readers. Did you enjoy writing this?”
Record scratch.
“Yes,” I said without hesitation. “I loved it.”
“Okay,” Chloe said again. “There’s your answer.”
My writing—about burlesque, about girl bands with Shakespearean problems, all of it—isn’t activism. I’m not a fierce survivor, a Beyoncé or even a Taylor Swift. For years, I’ve reminded myself of my own privilege every goddamn day, and I will continue to do so. I don’t presume to speak for all burlesque dancers, all women, all bisexuals, all bodies.
I only have to speak—write—for me.
My stories aren’t the most glamorous, the most anger-inducing, but they are my own. I have a body, one that for ten years I used to shake for dollar bills I’d tuck into my safety thong, which we wore under our regular thongs to avoid the dreaded “lip slip.” I have a body, and that alone is fodder for a lifetime of memoir.
Lauren Emily Whalen lives in Chicago with her black cat, Rosaline, and an apartment full of books. She has essays forthcoming in Querencia Press's Spring 2023 Anthology, Blue Mesa Review and Jabberwock Review. Her adult debut, Tomorrow and Tomorrow--a rock and roll Macbeth remix co-written with Lillah Lawson--will be released October 17 by Sword and Silk. Lauren has written four books for young adults, most recently Take Her Down (Bold Strokes Books, 2022), as well as gift books for Running Press/Hachette, including Queer Eye: You are Fabulous. She is a regular contributor to Kirkus Reviews, Queerty and GO Magazine.
