Strip tease
The Ooh La La ladies can—and do—dance to just about anything
Cherry Poppins of Ooh La La Burlesque.
Eagles Of Death Metal, "I Only Want You"
FF: I dress up as an octopus, and I have a tentacle span when I spin of 21 feet. I have eight tentacles that I do a classic burlesque dance to.
Decider: Why the octopus?
FF: I don't know, there's some kind of phallic sense of excitedness with eight tentacles. We did a pirate show, it was called Shipwrecked, and we had a girl walk the plank, and so we wanted to do underwater acts. And I wanted to do something that hadn't been done before. You see girls being mermaids all the time, and I think that's boring, so I just thought of something that's underwater that would make a cool costume and decided to strip off tentacles. You can't really say you went to a burlesque show and got slapped in the face by a tentacle, and that was my goal.
D: So how do the Eagles Of Death Metal fit into all of that?
FF: I picked that song because I was having a really bad day and one of my co-workers, Josh, was like, "Listen to this song." We stood outside of 3 Kings and he played that song and we started dancing. And we danced to the whole song. Cars were honking at us, and people walking by were like, "What’s going on with them?" And it's a very seductive song. It's "I only want you" and to point at somebody with a tentacle is just different than giving the point and the wink.
AC/DC, "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"
SY: I did a janitor act, and I had a gold glitter toilet that I danced on. [Fanny Fitztightlee] had this old toilet, and she cleaned out everything and put gold glitter all over it and made a leopard-skin toilet seat. I came out and I had a big janitor suit on, a plunger, and the gloves—totally gross. So the guy that was the drag queen that was hosting our show pretended to go poop in the toilet, and I was coming by and mopping and I showed him off stage. I looked down like he didn't flush and was like "Oh my God, he didn't flush." I had the rubber gloves on and I reach my hands in and I'm all eww and then I plunge the toilet. And then all of a sudden I try to get all sexy and I start to bite off my gloves, and I'm like "Oh my God, I can't believe I just put my hands in there!" Everybody kind of laughs and grosses out at that part. And then the rest of it is very, um, '80s stripper. Like, I cut a wife beater off with a knife.
FF: Imagine Tawny Kitaen on a car, except a janitor.
Mötley Crüe, "Just Another Psycho”
CP: I bought this Halloween straitjacket, so it's really ghetto, but it gets the point across. Basically, my dance is I end up out of my straitjacket. I have these really long sleeves on, and I wave them all about and break out of my straight jacket, rip my pants off, and I've got these really cute pasties on. And after I take my pants off I still have my straight jacket on over my body, so I kind of tease with it and play with it. I do a lot of funky faces and I twitch a lot. I run across the stage like a crazy person. And it's funny because at the end of the dance, after I've disrobed to everything but my underwear, they have somebody come on the stage and they drag me off. It's so much fun. I love Mötley Crüe, I've been in love with them, and that's on their most recent album. And the moment I heard that, I was like, dude, I'm a psycho bitch. [Laughs.] I want to be psycho. That's awesome.
Björk, "Enjoy"
KK: I'm inspired by music more than anything. [For this song] I'm just a creepy doll that comes to life. I take off my clothes, obviously, but the kind of underlying thing is that this doll doesn't want to be a doll. She's coming to life, and stripping off her clothes, and at the end I go back to being doll-like and trapped.
D: What grabbed you about the song?
KK: I just loved it and put it on my iPod and just listened to it all the time. I think Björk's just an amazing, powerful person, and it's really fun for me to dance to her. Michelle called it avant-garde, and I don't know if I would go that far, but I like to think it's a little bit stranger than the traditional burlesque idea.
Salt-N-Pepa, "Push It"
Kitty Crimson: The whole show was called Occupational Hazards, so we profiled a bunch of different jobs. We had the sexy teacher, sexy schoolgirls, lunch ladies, and [Fanny] and I, as a joke, did a gynecologist act to "Push It" by Salt-N-Pepa. We had a massage table on the stage, and I came out and I stripped down and put on a hospital gown and acted like I was all scared, and I went back and laid down on the table. And she came out and snapped on her gloves and put on a mask. Basically the whole premise of the act was her just pulling random things out from between my legs, like a parasol and a feather boa. It was really creepy, and that was probably the most twisted, outrageous act that I've ever been a part of. We were walking the line to offensive. It was pretty tasteless, but we think we're funny. As long as we're having a good time, we feel like the audience will.
