A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford.
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“I started doing burlesque back in 2003, when there wasn’t much of a scene in Chicago. There were only a couple of shows running. The prospect of somebody who was a trained actor who also didn’t mind taking her clothes off was a fairly appealing prospect to the few producers who were around at the time. Now I’m with the Kiss Kiss Cabaret.
“Once I performed at the Metro, before a Dresden Dolls show. It was the biggest audience I’d ever been in front of. I got on stage, and there was no music. I see the promoter working her way through the crowd to the stage, and she looks up at me and says, ‘Your CD is blank. Do you think if we played the music from the girl that went before you, you could just make something up?’ I said, ‘Well, I suppose so.’ I had to make it up, and I did. That was less like jumping out of an airplane than like jumping out of an airplane riding a shark diving into a shot glass of Jell-O.
