Pasties come in different sizes. That’s just one fact of the striptease life that Tara Vaughan Tremmel’s learned making a documentary on the history of burlesque.
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As soon as she got back to Chicago, she started talking about making a film. Though she’d never made one before, through friends at Women in the Director’s Chair she was able to assemble an experienced team of collaborators: Courtney Hermann, Gwen Lis, Lisa Samra, and Ronit Bezalel, director of the 1999 documentary Voices of Cabrini. With Evans and other former burlesque starlets pushing 80, time is of the essence: “How terrible it would be if, once they die, all their stories die with them,” says Lis.
Chicago occupies a proud place in the history of burlesque. After belly dancer Little Egypt gyrated half naked on the Midway at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, dancers across the country co-opted her shimmies and veils, and the Hootchy Cootchy was born. Chicago also may have been the scene of the first strip, sometime in the 1920s, though New York claims this distinction as well. “It’s debatable,” says Tremmel, but the first striptease probably occurred “when something accidentally fell off.”
Tremmel dreams of adding Chicago to the list of cities like New York and Seattle currently experiencing something of a burlesque revival. Partly to that end, as well as to raise money for the documentary, she’s organized Gurlesque, a two-hour show featuring 20 performers–comics, singers, a magician, a knife thrower, a fire-eater, and, of course, dancers, including Gyna Rose Jewel, a former burlesque showgirl who will appear in the film.
