Thanks to everyone who tuned into my first STARF⭐️CKER LIVE! with
In case you missed it, watch it here. We discuss our grooming habits, stripping from the 90s to now, magic tricks, why my burlesque documentary Pretty Things isn’t (yet) available for streaming, who has more eccentric personal style, Dita’s thoughts on nosy interviewers, eroticizing a mannequin leg and more…
Mistakes from a first-time filmmaker
The finale number for my documentary, Pretty Things (HBO 2005) was shot in downtown Los Angeles, at the beautiful art deco Orpheum Theater. The Orpheum was a major burlesque and vaudeville era stomping ground and one of the last theaters in America to host two-a-day vaudeville shows. It closed in the mid-1940s until 2001 when it began a multiple years long restoration project under the Ace Hotel.
Music from Pretty Things
Here’s a playlist with some of the music from Pretty Things minus the original score, which included covers of me singing Big Spender and Fever. The soundtrack mixed jazz and blues giants like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Eartha Kitt and Fats Waller with 70s funk artists Betty Davis and Parliament (as in the funkadelic prime minister George Clinton.)
Pinups
As much as I cared about fashion in the 90s and early 2000s, it wasn’t my vibe to be overly done up. This was mostly due to my feminist mother not wanting me to conform to “patriarchal standards of beauty” when everyone else my age was experimenting with makeup. So I wasn’t allowed to pierce my ears, wear mascara or lipstick. I got my nose pierced at 14 because this was a loophole in her no piercing rule, and she paid me to take it out.
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