Like Yaddo . . . With Pasties

Thank god summer’s over — everyone but you has been relaxing, recreating and honing their particular set of skills while you’ve been slaving away here in the city:

Once a month on a sleepy Wednesday night at the Slipper Room, women from around the city gather with pasties, costumes and a stack of striptease autobiographies to gab about burlesque.

. . .

The salon lasts for about an hour, and gives burlesque dancers a chance to try out new acts and receive feedback from other performers. In between workshops, they take turns reading passages from the autobiographies of famous burlesque dancers and, much like a Bible study, discuss what they can learn from the reading.

“The experience of burlesque then and the experience of burlesque now are completely unrecognizable, don’t you find?” Professor Jo Boobs, who leads the salon, said after a reading about Gypsy Rose Lee. “I think a lot of us focus on the community because no matter how hard you work, the focus on burlesque is no longer on the income.”

Jo Boobs has just returned from a burlesque retreat in the woods of Washington state. She is an important figure in the New York burlesque scene, teaching several classes annually and serving as a G-string godmother to the new girls . . .

(You might think this has a “Hack Heaven” feel to it but it in fact seems to be real . . . besides, it would be extraordinarily lame to do that in Metro New York, wouldn’t it?)