But thanks to a growing number of former punks and disillusioned swing kids, burlesque has been resurrected with a postmodern, DIY spin. Michelle Carr fired the first shot, starting up the Velvet Hammer dance troupe in Lo s Angeles in 1995, with swing combo Royal Crown Revue often providing tunes. Soon after, one-time S.F. resident Lorelei Fuller formed the Shim Shamettes, a 15-member”beauty chorus” based out of New Orleans’ Shim Sham Club, named after a similar Big Easy venue from the ’30s. Along with its backing band the Shim Sham Revue, the company re-creates vintage routines from past legends, includi ng Kitty West’s famed Evangeline the Oyster Girl number.

As you’d expect, the Bay Area overflows with burlesque talent. There are the Devil-Ettes, a constantly growing ensemble of kitschily coiffed hoofers led by Baby Doe, the co-founder of America’s first burlesque convention, Tease-O-Rama. (The second annual Tease-O-Rama takes place in San Francisco this week at Bimbo’s and Broadway Studios, featuring over 200 performers.) There are Dane’s Dames, the vaudeville slap(stick)-and-tickle outfit of ex-swing maven Eddie Dane; the Go-Going Gone Girls, a ’60s song-and-dance troupe; and the Cantankerous Lollies, a trio of showgirls with a taste for French cancan and slinky cabaret. The glue that holds these acts together is S.F.’s Famous Burlesque Orchestra, a bunch of lapsed piano punks, warped accordionists, acid-jazzers, and horny gorillas who happily put the ring in ring-a-ding-ding.

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S.F.’s Famous Burlesque Orchestra grew out of Fisherman’s Famous Burlesque, a group started by Brian Lease in 1998 to provide sophisticated boom boom for the Cantankerous Lollies. Fi sherman’s Burlesque quickly became a repository for members of the local rock scene, including East Bay Ray, the Dead Kennedys guitarist who’d played with Lease in the saucy lounge group Frenchy; ex-Thinking Fellers drummer Paul Bergmann; and one-time Courtney Love bandmate Suzanne Ramsey.

In the mid-’80s Ramsey played with Love and future members of Babes in Toyland and L7 in a band called both Sugar Baby Doll and Sugar Babylon. “We were heavily influenced by the Cocteau Twins,” she laughs, comparing the act with the wimpy, ethereal ’80s altrockers.”I was the floweriest pianist you ever heard – I [played] like a fairy running through the woods.”

Not surprisingly, Sugar Baby Doll didn’t last long. After the group broke up in 1987, Ramsey dropped out of the music scene, taking a job at a San Francisco antique store and working the occasional wedding and bar mitzvah. Ten years later, a customer introduced her to 80-year-old Bob Grimes, who supplies cabaret stars the world over with sheet music. After he gave Ramsey some “racy, naughty, silly stuff,” her musical career was reborn. Calling herself “Kitten on the Keys,” Ramsey began performing lascivious tunes from the ’20s and ’30s, numbers like Fats Waller’s”Honeysuckle Rose,” which she says is –a song about pussy, honey.”

“I’ve always had a fascination for it,” Ramsey says of the old-time style.”I used to skip school and stay home and watch old movies, especially Shirley Temple, Laurel & Hardy, and the Little Rascals.”

“[The music’s] gosh-darn fun,” she continues.”It took a lot of intellect – there’s all this veiled naughtiness going on. They actually had to be very clever and very witty, and I don’t think a lot of songwriters are very clever and witty today.”

Ramsey’s singing voice – a hilarious Betty Boop coo that seems to wiggle as it leaves her lips – is perfect for the songs. She has a terrific sense of phrasing as well, going from move-that-hand-just-don’t-remove-that-hand flirtation to brassy give-me-what-I-need oomph. Her piano playing travels from jaunty to delicate to lurid with the grace of a cat.

And just when you think you’ve seen all of Ramsey’s talents, she’ll bust out with her Shirley Temple striptease, in which she sheds her threads to a lewd version of “On the Good Ship Lollipop.”

Ramsey soon disco vered that there were plenty of like-minded folks around town. Besides her solo show, she began playing smutty duets with Daddy Frank & the Uke You Can’t Refute, accompanying the high-flying kicks of the Cantankerous Lollies, and tickling the ivories with Fisherman’s Famous Burlesque, which originally featured one of her musical heroes, East Bay Ray.

“I tried to pay [Ray] off for sexual favors but ended up with autographed pink ruffle-y panties,” Ramsey says.”I wear ’em to shows for good luck – a peek is only a quarter.”

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Like Ramsey, Paul Bergmann, leader and bassist of S.F.’s Famous Burlesque Orchestra, began his musical career far from the dance halls of burlesque. He drummed for local art-rock combo Thinking Fellers in the late ’80s, and later played with Barbara Manning’s SF Seals, Mingo 2000, and other area indie bands. By 1997, however, he’d changed his focus and was performing with Brian Lease in what Bergmann describes as a “tiki bebop band.” When the group was asked to play a one-off show called “Tease-O-Rama” at the Cocodrie, the members rounded up some dancers and learned some “raunchy ’40s to ’60s” tunes.

After hooking up with the Cantankerous Lollies the following year, the combo morphed into Fisherman’s Famous Burlesque, a group that played with one foot on the Sunset Strip and the other in the gutter. Last August, Lease moved to New York City, and Bergmann changed the band’s moniker and took over the reins. Currently, the ensemble includes Polkacide leader and saxophonist Ward Abronski (who blew on Flipper’s punk classic “Sex Bomb”), trumpeter Andy DeGiovanni, one-time acid-jazz star Paul Scriver, ex-punk guitarist Frank Novicki, and former Jumbo Shrimp drummer Dana Burt, along with Kitten on the Keys.

Why are so many punks and rockers drawn to this sound? “It’s still lowbrow sort of stuff,” Bergmann explains with a laugh. “It’s artistic but it’s not high art.”

Burlesque may not be high art, but it has provided the band with some unusual live gigs. Earlier this year, the troupe headed to L.A., where it played the famed Brown Derby as Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and five of his blond girlfriends watched. Then the collective traveled to Exotic World, the museum owned by the 70-year-old self-proclaimed “Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque,” Dixie Evans. Out in the Mojave Desert, the group delivered backup music for routines by old-time queens Te mpest Storm and Dee Milo and participated in accordion jams, fire-breathing contests, and Spin the Bottle games with former light technicians for ELO.

Burlesque Orchestra shows can take many forms. While the band supplies everything from sleazy noir-jazz to bopping pop-crunch to sultry spy-lounge, MC Mad V. Dog offers up comedic chestnuts that are funny because they’re completely unfunny. The Cantankerous Lollies always kick up a storm, as do the Go-Going Gone Girls. Molotov and Felicity may swallow swords or breath fire, Simone de la Getto might sing “Zing Went the Strings of My Petticoat,” and the Boing Boing Boy occasionally doffs his clothes while hopping on a pogo stick. If things get a little stale, there’s always Gorilla X, who has practiced his banana-and-Red Bull-fueled hijinks onstage with No Doubt and on screen on TV’s Maury.

“It’s funny, it’s mirthful, with a real powerful sense of humor, a real shtick, naughty and playful,” pianist Ramsey says.

“The appeal for me in all burlesque is the creative titillation,” says Novicki, who replaced guitarist Ray six months ago. “It’s not pornographic, but it is pretty nasty, depending on how dirty your mind is. And it’s not just a bunch of good-loo king girls running around the stage taking their clothes off.”

As for why the burlesque revival has been such a success, Novicki postulates, “This isn’t a bunch of hacks trying to get a record deal or trying to be the next big thing -- it’s people trying to put on a really good show.”

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Oddly enough, most folks go to Tease-O-Rama for the tease, not the tunes. Here are some of the highlights of the convention – from solo sirens to tawdry troupes, horny honkers to hot how-tos.

Dance Workshop S.F.’s Brazilian burlesque group Hot Pink Feathers offers tips on how to shake and shimmy with the best of them.

The Gun St. Girls While this Seattle/Portland troupe dresses old-fashioned, it dances only to modern sounds -- punk, punk, and more punk. Using whips and guns onstage, Miss A. Sphyxia, Hangman Lola, and the other vixens drag glitter through the gutter.

Harvest Moon (featuring Fisherman) Having started the Cantankerous Lollies in San Francisco in 1995, Harvest Moon danced off to New York with multi-instrumentalist Brian Lease (ex-Fisherman’s Famous Burlesque) last year. The c ouple’s act, which they still perform in the Big Apple, includes hula hoops, contortions, and a mean-sounding xylophone.

The History of Burlesque New Orleans-based filmmaker Rick Delaup unveils the naked truth about old-time burlesque. Complete with guest commentary from icon Kitty West and film clips from the ’50s.

Dee Milo Now in her 70s, this legendary hoofer began her career in 1949 as”the Venus of Dance.” Hopefully, she’ll perform her famous tease routines like”Sentimental Journey,” in which she depicts a lovers’ reunion after wartime, and”I Married an Angel,” which provides a glimpse at what happens after the ceremony.

Pasty-making Workshop When not singing and dancing at New York’s Le Scandal cabaret, Miss Bonnie Dunn shows ladies (and men, if they like) how to fashion their very own nipple protectors. Start the holiday gift-buying season off right.

The Sophisticats & the Sophistikittens New Orleans’ answer to the Devil-Ettes, the Sophistikittens shake, rattle, and roll to the vintage sounds of the Sophisticats. Anything from surfy rumble to rumba lounge to bluesy swagger is fair game, as long as the horns are honking and the dames are dancing dir ty.

Dita Von Teese This pinup girl is often called”The Modern-Day Bettie Page.” On her Web site, www.dita.net, she proudly declares that she wears only vintage clothing and drives around in a 1939 Chrysler New Yorker. She’s scheduled to be on the cover of Playboy in December, and Bizarre magazine once declared her the third”most sexiest woman.”

The World Famous Bob This New Yorker’s claim to fame is her ability to mix martinis in her cleavage. Who says burlesque ain’t high art?

The World Famous Pontani Sisters While Helen, Tara, and Angie are indeed sisters, there’s no way to know if they are, in fact, world famous. (Well, they have appeared in Dutch and Italian magazines.) Still, the trio proves that the family that strips together stays together -- especially when reviving old vaudeville, MGM musical, and Tin Pan Alley numbers. As seen on Late Night With Conan O’Brien. (Dan Strachota)

TEASE-O-RAMA 2002
Sep. 29 - Bimbo’s (San Francisco)
Bimbo’ ;s 365 was the site of the second annual Tease-O-Rama, featuring three nights of dirty dancing, vaudeville comedy and Girls! Girls! Girls! Over 40 acts from across the USA invoked the spirit of classic burlesque to a soundtrack of the century’s sleaziest music. Local legends like The Devil-ettes, The Cantankerous Lollies and The Go Going Gone Girls were joined by SoCal sexpots including Dames In Dis’Dress and Kiki DeVille and a bevy of East Coast performers including Dirty Martini, Trixie Little and the World Famous Pontani Sisters as they shook their money makers and inflamed the imaginations of the sharply dressed crowd. Dancers representing every part of the country strutted their stuff to the feverish sounds of New Orleans’ Sophisticats and San Francisco’s own Famous Burlesque Orchestra. Fetish pinups like Dita Von Teese and Catherine D’Lish made eyes pop and jaws drop with their mesmerizing moves, and even the notoriously icy staff at Bimbo’s couldn’t keep their eyes off the stage as these sirens of smut teased, taunted and almost took it all off, all night long. Vintage comedy from the Baggy Pants Comedy Revue and Kappy Kaplan gave the girls time to slip into something more comfortable, like a giant champagne glass or an outfit made entirely of balloons. MCs Luigi Scorcia and Monic a the Tiki Goddess kept things rolling with snappy repartee as lounge legend Connie Champagne showed off an able pair of lungs. Tease-O-Rama promises to change cities each year, but the San Francisco edition is going to be hard to beat. (Blag Dahlia)

April 11, 2002 - SF Chronicle
FEELING DOWN?
S.F. BURLESQUE IS OVER THE TOP
I’d just been caught in a sudden shower on Haight Street after work Tuesday when a guy selling green bud broke off his sales pitch. “Smile, you’ll look better,” he said. What? Is there a comeback to remarks like these? How about,”Bathe, you’ll look better?” I mean, some grubby petty criminal, some feckless – and no doubt unprosecuted! – sidewalk dope dealer is telling me how I can improve myself? Screw that! Yes, it’s a quality of life issue, all right, though it’s also true there’s nothing like a drizzly and dismal spring evening – sodden trash in the gutters and commuters caroming heedlessly homeward – to put you at odds with the world. Luckily, I had plans: to see San Francisco’s premiere burlesque extravaganza. The Cantankero us Lollies! The Go Going Gone Girls! Molotov the Sword Swall ower! Felicity the Spanish Spitfire! And, last but not least, San Francisco’s Famous Burlesque Orchestra, featuring Kitten on the Keys! Under the mirror ball and within the smoky blue walls of the Mission’s Make- Out Room, almost everyone seemed to be smiling. Maybe it was the magic of – well, show business.”This is burlesque the way it was,” explained Mad V. Dog, the show’s emcee, who was wearing a top hat and a silver-trimmed tux, and whose cheek and shirt front sported fresh lipstick marks.“You might mention I am San Francisco’s favorite emcee,” he added. How do you measure something like that? “I say it.” In fact, one of the nice things about burlesque is that, in a world in which the redemptive power of celebrity is conferred by fiat on a select few – sort of like knighthood, only more so – burlesque performers are allowed to dub themselves “favorite,” or“lovely,” or even“famous,” just because they feel like it. Thus, San Francisco’s Famous Burlesque Orchestra will be performing on the 20th in L.A.’s Palace Theatre at a benefit for the Exotic World Burlesque Museum, alongside such stars as Dita von Teese, Kitten DeVille and Miss Exotic World 2001, Sacramento’s own Cherry Malone. Exotic World? Well, that’s a whole other explanation: The Exotic World Burlesque Museum, in the desert off I-15 in Helendale, is run by the legendary Dixie Evans – known, in the ’50s, as the Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque. While its facilities are in need of repair, it’s a repository of treasures – Sally Rand’s shoes, the pasties and G-strings of the famous, from Lili St. Cyr to Bettie Page.“It’s amazing,” said Mad Dog.“It’s like a David Lynch movie.” The orchestra, too – saxophones, trombone, horn, guitar, bass, drums, bongos and keyboard – was amazing, accompanying singer Suzanne“Kitten on the Keys” Ramsey as the Cantankerous Lollies, in black velvet hats, black bustiers and satin slips, stripped off first the bustiers – revealing black lace bras – and then the slips, revealing matching briefs and seamed nylons, to appreciative whoops from the crowd. Mad Dog claimed to have been hit hard by Milton Berle’s death: “For the last five years he had been listing me as a dependent on his taxes.” Rim shot.“Of course, when I heard the news, all I could think was, ‘One step closer to the top.’” Another rim shot, cheers, groans. Then there’s Muni:”You know those new billboards – Com-Muni-ty? The other day I asked my bus driver for a transfer. He sai d, ‘Just tell the next bus driver Joe sent you.’” The Go Going Gone Girls, in marabou and nylon peignoirs, performed “Give Him a Great Big Kiss,” as a stripper named Rocky removed his shirt and unzipped his leather pants. More cheering, and Mad Dog reappeared, this time wearing a Fujieda baseball shirt. “I love baseball,” he told the crowd. “My favorite baseball movie is the one about the support group for flashers–‘Eight Men Out.’” Then, sitting in a purportedly electrified chair, Felicity the Spanish Spitfire lit torches and illuminated fluorescent tubes with her breasts. Then there was a bump-and-grind contest, and then there was a grand finale involving the Lollies, the Going Gone Girls and a man in a gorilla suit, and – unbelievably – they’ll be doing it all again next month, May 7th at the Make-Out Room. It was past midnight and I was starving; I stopped at Mel’s for a burger and fries. Fabulous Mel’s! Home of the World Famous Repetitive Jukebox! Sometimes, it’s just how you look at things. (Laurel Wellman)

October 13, 1999 - SF Weekly
A FLEETING REMEMBERANCE
Rosette gently pushes herself away from the graffitied wall of the Blue Bar and walks up the hill with delicate, intangible steps that seem to impose on only the tips of her toes. At the corner, she stops, avoiding all but the slightest physical brush with humanity as her eyes flit across the surfaces of Broadway, looking for a new place to light.

“I do not want to miss any thing,” she says with careful, feathery articulation, “but I also do not want to be distinct.” Originally from Manila, Rosette is small-boned and ageless, as pretty as anything North Beach has to offer. She settles onto a low sidewalk step on Kearny and stretches a languid arm into the night, staring past the neon glow, into the shadowy stars above. The balmy weather and the giddy hustle of Broadway have left Rosette feeling sentimental: Eight years ago, she fell in love with a Navy man with whom she had spent as many weeks, and after he returned to the Chicago area, she followed, aided by the substantial bit of money he had left her.

“Why else would he leave me his address and so much money?” Rosette says demurely, glancing through her false lashes with large, searching, liquid-brown irises.

“Anywho,” she says wrinkling her nose, “he tells me he’s in love with a woman woman, and he’s very angry, so I split and come here, meet some friends on Polk and do okay.” But, still, Rosette has a soft spot for men in uniform, and every year, during Fleet Week, she comes to watch the rambunctious young recruits pass by, always hoping for the off chance her man might be among them.

“It’s silly. I know. But I want to look at him, just a little,” says Rosette, lighting a long, mentholated cigarette and smoothing out her thin, summer dress. “And the men in uniform are cute to watch. But I’m done for military men.”

The landscape is littered with uniforms caught in the rosy shadow of strip clubs and adult theaters, the men loud and gunning for a good time. Some dangle out of street-level bar windows, seeming to overflow from the buildings as they heckle fellow servicemen passing by; others stop to talk too long with the exotic dancers outside their theaters, causing the ladies to roll their eyes as the men finally enter. Tak en in groups, the men are eye-catching, somehow aesthetically engaging in their solidarity; isolated, they are gangly, overloud, hormone-challenged young males let loose in a strange new city where they are expected to appear bold and dauntless... except for Rosette’s mark, a tall, square-shouldered Marine with a well-bred gait, who actually tips his hat before stepping aside to allow two women to pass by on the crowded sidewalk.

“Like Cary Grant,” coos Rosette, stepping into the stream.

“Buddy, you don’t want a burlesque show,” says a civilian to a Navy boy too young to get into the Hi-Ball Lounge. “They don’t take it off, and it’s sold-out, anyway. Go down the street.”

He goes, and misses something. Inside the Hi-Ball, surrounded by red velvet and Barbary Coast zebra skin, the burlesque bump-and-grind of the Fisherman’s Xylophonic Brass Orchestra seems to complete the evening’s queer sense of nostalgia. An up-tempo go-go number brings to stage the irrepressible Going Going Gone Girls, who shimmy and jiggle in short-shorts and go-go boots. MC Mad Dog, a man “destined to spend his life pulling on doors marked pull,” takes the stage in an ill-fitting jacket filled with worse-fitting jokes.

“Working in a burlesque show is like working in a candy store. After the first day, it’s no big deal but, oh brother, that first day!” The appropriate bad-joke drum roll is inserted by Fisherman here, and accents nearly every joke hereafter. “How do you put out hot pants? With pantyhose!” The crowd groans appreciatively, and silver-haired Felix Rowan leans over to excitedly squeeze his wife of 19 years.

San Francisco’s Tap Darlings take the stage in pink boas and seamed stockings. If not terribly talented, they exhibit an enthusiasm that could charm the cherry out of a Manhattan, and the xylophone trills, and thrills, under the direction of Fisherman and his fez. More bad jokes and booing give way to a lusty song by Toots La Rue - Marilyn Monroe - who inspires a knife fight between two suitors before being saved by a man in a gorilla suit. Then the statuesque Kaotica du Flambeau enters through a plume of stifling incense to do the “dance of the mother goddess,” an awkward, sexless belly-dance made dangerous by a flaming sword precariously balanced on her head. More bad jokes.

Forty-six-year-old Laura Ethington moans, “This is not titillating. There should be more boom-boom in burlesque,” and wipes sweat from her brow. As if on cue, Mad Dog calls for an intermission, which sends the stage crew scampering onstage to struggle with a giant white screen in a way that would make the kings of slapstick proud. A few audience members of nervous dispositions, or short attention spans, leave the club, just as San Francisco’s six-gal burlesque squad, the Cantankerous Lollies, appears in curvaceous silhouette behind the screen. Red hair, black hair, and platinum - their attributes are called out in verse as they sidle in front of the spotlight with Spanish shawls, fans, top hats, guns, and stilettos, with only their high-heeled feet revealed beneath the screen in vivid Technicolor.

“That’s a little better,” smiles Ethington as the Lollies exit and the stage crew once again struggles uproariously with the screen while the be-fezzed band continues its steady grind. After a moment, the entertainers return in fishnets and red tassels for synchronized chair dancing that requires a trollop in the audience to give up her seat. After another moment, it’s long slinky gowns in pastel colors, with matching parasols that only occasionally threaten th e dancers’ high-piled, long-tendriled wigs; then white crinolines, ruffly underwear, and a can-can line that leaves someone in the crowd roaring,”Is it the heat, or the ladies?” The Going Going Gone Girls return with bikinis and Laugh-Injubilance while we await the featured attraction, Hollywood’s Velvet Hammer Burlesque.

“Kitten Delight is a green-eyed, platinum-haired goddess who likes to listen to the Sonics while tooling around in her ’63 Dodge Dart station wagon,” reads Mad Dog. Miss Delight arrives on stage, all smooth-skinned and Hollywood-tanned. Under the grumble of Tom Waits, she quickly strips down to a beaded G-string and tassels. Ursalina follows, equally tan and blonde, in a huge pink boa and genie wrap, which she quickly loses. Then, it’s the exotic Valentina Violette, who arrives in a gorilla mask with silver cuffs on her wrists and her ankles. Taking tropical inspiration from burlesque queen Blaze Starr, Violette rips off her mask and writhes to “jungle drums” before stripping off her zebra-skin loin cloth. Lastly, Miss Exotic World 1999 Lotus Derringer takes the stage in a beaded G-string that shimmers with every slow, methodical twitch. She smiles and flirts with darting eyes and a no-effort lipstick-red smile. She balances a sword atop a fall of perfect ebony hair accented by a large white flower. She pauses and shakes, undulating slowly. For the first time in the night, the sweltering room seems silent, lit only by Derringer’s pale, luminescent skin. She slinks out of her glittery beads, down to a thin gold G-string and pasties. Within seconds, the mystique is gone and so is she.

“I bet that’s how burlesque used to look back in the old days,” says Nathan Iyer. “Like that Derringer chick. I think it’s funny how the girls from San Francisco are kind of silly and messy and cute, and the girls from L.A. are all slick and professional like strippers. I don’t know where that last girl was from, but she was pretty cool.”

Outside, Rosette has returned to her stair on Kearny.

“I’m done for military men,” she says with a breathy pout. “Good watching, only.” She indicates the seat next to her and offers me a smoke. “Were the women inside prettier than me?” A slight roll of the shoulder joins the big, liquid brown eyes.

“Not much,” I say.

“I could dance for San Francisco next time?”

Indeed. (Silke Tudor)