Jo Weldon

Sideshows by the Seashore, Coney Island

Neo-burlesque, interesting to look at it now because, you know, 25 years ago with no social media, if you watch eighties movies and you see how rapey they are, I think it's really clear what a lot of us were protesting by going out in public and owning our bodies naked in front of a room full of people by our choice, and using our bodies to tell all kinds of stories, not just erotic narratives.

Although I believe erotic narratives also belong in burlesque, but like, you know, to do comedy and variety and horror and politics and, you know, to do emo pieces or whatever and use our naked bodies to do that was very needed at that time. You know, for us to have fun with our bodies in that particular way was extremely needed.

It's an energy. It's like there's more to do, there's always more to do. And so I think burlesque was always political and will continue to be. And even historically, before there was striptease and burlesque, it was political. Working at the Burlesque Hall of Fame, I've been watching these older women perform. You come out and you see a woman who's 80 years old, stripped down to a g-string and pasties and get a standing ovation from a thousand people.

When aging people are not supposed to get naked, they're not really supposed to be public. They're not supposed to be glamorous. They're not supposed to be sexy for sure, and they come out, they own it. You can see their skill. That has so much to do with it, knowing how overly looked and abused they were in regard to their art form, which is highly mocked when I was young.

Honoring people who've been erased is a big part of it, which is why the inclusion factor has become so important to me, you know, in the present as well. But for me it's been so much about them, about my foremothers and about, you know, knowing what they went through. I'm used to a lot of younger people seeing older people as being so far from them in so many ways, but they're not, and it's a loss to not know that. That has so much to do with my interest in burlesque.

The New York School Burlesque started in 2004 because I had a website that was sort of a fan site for both strip joints and burlesque, and I'm really just separating them because of their intended audience and the venue, right?

So at that time, strippers and strip joints were just starting to do all these entrepreneurial things online that were really fascinating. And then the neo burlesque movement was also taking off. And these are my two loves that are really one love. But I started teaching and I had so much fun doing it, and I’d be standing in front of this studio mirror and I would put pasties on people and I made these big batches of pasties out of like vinyl so I could make them really fast and put them on people and showed them the easiest trick to do a tassel twirl.

I would see these half naked women of every shape smiling at themselves in the mirror as it happened. And I was like, whatever this is, I want there to be more of it and I want to be a part of it. Just the looks on their faces, the happiness, because, you know, we aren't trained to look in the mirror and be happy about looking at ourselves.

The quarantine shut us down in the middle of a month long series in March. I was having a very challenging time because my mother was really sick. In February I went to see her and she made me promise not to travel anymore while this coronavirus thing was going on. So I canceled gigs already before.

Then she died in March. And you know, again, I'm in the middle of this series and I had to move it online on Zoom, and I had not been teaching online. It was really helping me get out of my grief because people were still getting this experience of it and there was still a demand.

I think the second month that I did it, I had the most people I've ever had in classes because it was new to them. And there were people that had read my book and always wanted to see what it was like to take a class from me. I was in the middle of a big project when the pandemic started, so I had put the School of Burlesque on Automatic, which I couldn't do once I had to go online, I had to figure that out. I had other teachers coming in. I had all my classes covered for six months. I had just gotten a residency at the New York Public Library, which was a lifetime dream. I’m 57. This is a dream of a lifetime at 57 that I've got a residency at the New York Public Library to do my research.

I'm researching sex workers intersections with fashion, dress and culture. You know, I was really looking forward to doing that. And I had set aside six months of my life for it. And then I don't know if I would have been able to do it honestly after my mom died anyway. But libraries closed, you know, and I had to teach and hustle as if I had just started.

So…I forgot what I was saying…Sorry, I'm still in a state of grief and still grieving. And I do sometimes…just everything just stops like just completely stops...