Shortly after running the article, the Times published a letter (available in full from the archives I directed you to above) from none other than the sole surviving Minsky, brother Morton, who suggested, “While you are lauding La Guardia’s virtues, I think you should remember his lack of foresight in closing the Minsky Theaters. He used autocratic powers…The burlesque industry lacked funds to fight for its constitutional rights.”
Shortly after that, the Franklin Furnace Archive published a letter from Dick D. Zigun, who said he longed for a modern version of burlesque: “Can’t anyone else imagine a new burlesque theatre, one with its consciousness raised? … Why not insist on a performance wild and wonderful enough to include a novelty hermaphrodite act? Why don’t we challenge and entertain our fantasies as much your theatre did in your time? We need you back, Mr. Minsky. … Nudity is a powerful theatrical device — it need not exploit its performers.”
I am not going to reproduce the letter in full here, but you get the idea–the burlesque Zigun describes is indeed the burlesque he helped to create.
Dick told me that in winter of 1974, in his junior year at Bennington, he did a two-month internship at the American Place Theater in Times Square. He became a big fan of the Melody, which he describes as the last of the traditional strip joints without lap dances or champagne rooms. This later moved to Tribeca, where the recently closed Collective UnConscious was housed. Later the Babydoll and the Blue Angel opened in the same area.
He created the Mermaid Parade in 1983 in 1985 moved into the building on the corner of 12th Street and Surf Avenue. In 1986 he joined forces with Wild Girl (Erica Peterson), a WFMU DJ who was into hotrods and riot grrrls. She was doing events in NJ called Go-Go-Ramas, which were not topless. They began to do Wild Girl’s Go-Go-Rama in the building in Coney Island. We started experiementing, just several “powerful women dacing all at once.” They tried it with a live rock band, and had some solo acts including belly dancers and other variety performers.
When Wild Girl departed they began dong Coney-A-Go-Go about 1989, around the time Otter was doingTrip and Go Naked at the Pyramid Club and, Dick says, then as now, “Everybody was influencing everybody else.” And the Blue Angel came along, which at first was primarily a lap dance party and developed over time as a burlesque show composed of solo stripteasers and variety artists. In the early 1990s, Ami Goodheart was involved in producing Dutch Wiesman’s, which nurtured performers such as Angie Pontani, who has been producing shows at Coney Island for several years.
(Above: Julie and Bambi at Dick’s 50th Birthday Party, 2003. Photos by Jo Weldon)
When I interviewed Fredini, who has been producing Burlesque at the Beach with Bambi the Mermaid since the 1990s, he described performers circulating from the Blue Angel, Trip and Go Naked, fetish clubs, drag bars, the sideshow, the circus, and other not-obviously-burlesque venues. In the late 1990s/early 2000a I was performing at Click N Drag, “an amalgamation of art, fashion and performance consistently blending computer-age references with a theatrical sensibility, sexual ambiguity and a strict dress code, rigidly enforced on the famous and the up-and-coming equally”), as well as occasionally go-going at Squeezebox, where I met World Famous *BOB*, and at Coney Island High, the Blue Angel and at Burlesque at the Beach, while many other regular Coney Island performers were also appearing in the VaVaVoom Room and The Red Vixen.
So it’s no exaggeration to say that Dick Zigun was at the root of the burlesque revival that is currently in such high gear, and it should be no surprise that New York Burlesque bears such a distinct Coney Island imprint.
There’s more to come, since Dick has an entire manifesto! The more you listen to him talk about burlesque and his vision for it, the more you love that burlesque–and the more you love Dick Zigun.
– Jo Weldon
Jo Weldon is Headmistress of the award-winning New York School of Burlesque and is a regularburlesque performer. Visit burlesquedaily.blogspot.com to read her daily blog.