Tease-O-Rama has enjoyed fabulous success since our 2001 show, which drew thousands people to New Orleans to witness the as-yet-unpublicized phenomenon of modern burlesque. In 2002, we moved our show to the gorgeous Bimbo's 365 Club in San Francisco - not only did we make the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle and SF Weekly, but we were pre-sold out before we even opened the doors! In 2003, we made headlines in Hollywood. 2005 was the year we brought it back to the City by the Bay, San Francisco!

Since Tease-O-Rama 2001, we have seen a consistently increasing upswing in popular interest in burlesque. Many of the acts featured in Tease-O-Rama have enjoyed greater recognition since performing in New Orleans in 2001. New York's Pontani Sisters were guests several times on The Conan O' Brien Show, Dita von Teese appeared on the December 2002 cover of Playboy, and LA's Velvet Hammer troupe also enjoyed multiple television news spots on Entertainment Tonight. The Exotic World Burlesque Museum was featured on both CBS and NBC news. Tease-O-Rama and Tease-O-Rama performers have been featured on NPR and A&E, and have been noted in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Hustler magazine, the New York Times, and so many others! Not to mention the opening of all-burlesque clubs in Los Angeles, New Orleans and Las Vegas, the Broadway revival of Gypsy, the HBO burlesque film Pretty Things and the Bravo reality series based in a burlesque nightclub! Miss Exotic World 2002 and repeat Tease-O-Rama performer Kitten DeVille was even recently featured on VH1's The Surreal Life teaching burlesque move to their cast of peculiar celebrities.

2001: New Orleans
Over three nights and days at the Howlin' Wolf and Shim Sham Club, we saw our very first event go off with a bang! The now-legendary Dita von Teese graced our stage with her partner in crime Catherine D'Lish; the Pontani Sisters started their Go-Go Robics class, which they now teach all over America; Hustler photographer on assignment Anna Curtis caught the burlesque bug and started her own troupe, the Bombshell! Girls; 50's Bourbon Street diva Kitty West taught vintage burlesque technique and we learned to start having our shows in cities that have a closing time! It took us a year to recover.

2002: San Francisco
Moving our show to the City by the Bay - a historical hotbed of vintage vice - we found ourselves moving up in the world! Bimbo's 365 Club, with its 1940's-style supper club décor, was the perfect venue for our stylish vixens to strut. We sold out the club even before the doors opened the first night and welcomed tons of new· faces to our crew. Our annual Legends of Burlesque discussion panel got fleshed out by stars like New Orleans' Wild Cherry, Exotic World curator Dixie Evans and San Francisco native Isis Starr. The Devil-Ettes ponied and Watusi'd in their hometown, and we hosted Dita von Teese and Kitty West's auditions for the new Evangeline the Oyster Girl. It was a smash!

2003: Los Angeles
The beautiful 1000+ capacity Henry Fonda Music Box Theatre was the perfect venue for our biggest show yet. With over 60 acts, we added a live video feed to an outdoor smoking lounge complete with hip lounge acts and a Marquis magazine photo session area. Russ Meyer vixen Kitten Natividad dropped by to visit and see the show, as did tons of Tinseltown celebrities. Even more new acts debuted on our stage, plus our favorite swingin' bands like the Sophisticats and the Fisherman's Burlesque Orchestra! As was only appropriate, we also started what we hope will be a new tradition by hosting the world premiere of the original burlesque film Broad Daylight on Sunday night at the gorgeous Silent Movie House.

2005: San Francisco
Bringing us back to the luxe and swanky Bimbo's 365 Club this was the BIGGEST and BEST Tease-O-Rama to date. We featured over 200+ contemporary pin-up queens, classes in everything from tassel-twirling to scholarly presentations on burlesque history and meaning, vintage movies, we added a burlesque shopping bazaar and so much more! We were proud to include a movie night gala event at the historic Victoria Theater (once a burlesque house known as 'The Follies') this night featured a panel of burlesque legends from the show girl heyday as well as vintage burlesque reels, the new burlesque short 'Camp Burlesque' and the West Coast Premiere of the Suicide girls movie' Black Heart Retrospective'. This was our second Tease-O-Rama hosted by the glamorous Kitten on the Keys who kept the audience dazzled with her spunky mischievous humor.

Also see our Organizers section for more behind the scenes info!

What Is Burlesque?
The dictionary defines burlesque as "a witty and mocking celebration of vaudeville entertainment" — a wry, tongue-in-cheek sendup of the popular style with a little sex appeal thrown in. There was a time when stripteasers were starlets: bawdy yet refined, these glamour girls strutted across the stages of the most opulent theatres in America draped in sequins and furs, making headlines on par with Hollywood sirens and driving fleets of Cadillacs dyed to match their poodles. The sexy thrill of their performances was rivaled only by the kind of talent and showmanship thatâs sadly long gone from the grinding strip shows of today.

From the sleazy bump n'grind of New York Cityâs first burlesque theatre, Minsky's Winter Garden on the Lower East Side, to the exemplar of the undraped live female form as art — Florenz Ziegfeld's 'Follies' — burlesque always offered a little something for everyone. The new burlesque incorporates playful eroticism, comic theatre and performance art — dressed to the nines in fabulous and fanciful costumes — to join the glamour of the past with the energy of the present. Tease-O-Rama, by bringing new and old burlesque performers together for one blowout weekend, helps keep the saucy showmanship alive for a new generation of ardent fans with a bawdy history lesson that's not to be missed.

Tease-O-Rama takes you back to the days when the tease outweighed the sleaze — when Blaze Starr, Tempest Storm and Lili St. Cyr shocked, titillated and teased theatres packed with sophisticated ladies and gentlemen in evening dress. Tease-O-Rama brings back the glamour of days gone by.