The performance art of burlesque, once a faded form, has made a comeback in the twenty-first century, and it has shimmied back to life with a vengeance in Cleveland. Thanks to fans and entrepreneurs, neo-burlesque has taken the stage—and it’s more inclusive, less seedy, and emphatically fun. Rust Belt Burlesque traces the history of burlesque in Cleveland from the mid-1800s to the present day, while also telling the story of Bella Sin, a Mexican immigrant who largely drove Northeast Ohio’s neo-burlesque comeback. The historical center of Cleveland burlesque was the iconic Roxy Theater on East Ninth Street. Here, in its twentieth-century heyday, famed dancers like Blaze Starr and comics like Red Skelton and Abbott and Costello entertained both regulars and celebrity guests. Erin O’Brien’s lively storytelling and Bob Perkoski’s color photos give readers a peek into the raucous Ohio Burlesque Festival that packs the house at the Beachland Ballroom every year. Today’s burlies come in all shapes, ethnicities, and orientations, drawing a legion of adoring fans. This is a show you won’t want to miss.

Gives a peek into the raucous Ohio Burlesque Festival that packs the house at the Beachland Ballroom every year. Today's burlies come in all shapes, ethnicities, and orientations, drawing a legion of adoring fans

This book should interest a wide spectrum of readers. For the younger ones, it will give them an up close and unblemished look at life as it was for people of their grandparents' era. For the older reader, it can provide a true reflection of the way they lived their lives as young Americans, back in the 1950s and 1960s, in the post World War II era. Every section of our country went through the change or even shutdown of some essential industrial economy, depending on where they lived. Whether it was iron and steel, coal mines, manufacturing, the auto industry, etc. This creeping demise of hundreds of thousands of jobs and family incomes forced hard choices for the current and future plans for millions of workers and their families. They forced styles of living and even behaviors to change due to these hardships. To those forced to live this way, it was not odd or perverted; it was the new normal. The reader must not be too quick to judge the people of these times and places for their behavior. Some inhabitants of these times saw no chance to escape this existence; others tried to leave and were drawn back many times as I was; but a few others could finally avoid the "rust belt" magnet and move into a new lifestyle through hard work and sheer determination. There were few advantages to living in the type of existence I grew up in and describe in this book, but, after breaking free, you knew, if you had a choice, it is not something you would want to experience a second time!

This path-breaking book examines the lives of five topless dancers in the economically devastated "rust belt" of upstate New York. With insight and empathy, Susan Dewey shows how these women negotiate their lives as parents, employees, and family members while working in a profession widely regarded as incompatible with motherhood and fidelity. Neither disparaging nor romanticizing her subjects, Dewey investigates the complicated dynamic of performance, resilience, economic need, and emotional vulnerability that comprises the life of a stripper. An accessibly written text that uses academic theories and methods to make sense of feminized labor, Neon Wasteland shows that sex work is part of the learned process by which some women come to believe that their self-esteem, material worth, and possibilities for life improvement are invested in their bodies.

Step into Ernst Wolzogen's Motley Theater, Max Reinhardt's Sound and Smoke, Rudolf Nelson's Chat noir, and Friedrich Hollaender's Tingel-Tangel. Enjoy Claire Waldoff's rendering of a lower-class Berliner, Kurt Tucholsky's satirical songs, and Walter Mehring's Dadaist experiments, as Peter Jelavich spotlights Berlin's cabarets from the day the curtain first went up, in 1901, until the Nazi regime brought it down. Fads and fashions, sexual mores and political ideologies--all were subject to satire and parody on the cabaret stage. This book follows the changing treatment of these themes, and the fate of cabaret itself, through the most turbulent decades of modern German history: the prosperous and optimistic Imperial age, the unstable yet culturally inventive Weimar era, and the repressive years of National Socialism. By situating cabaret within Berlin's rich landscape of popular culture and distinguishing it from vaudeville and variety theaters, spectacular revues, prurient nude dancing, and Communist agitprop, Jelavich revises the prevailing image of this form of entertainment. Neither highly politicized, like postwar German Kabarett, nor sleazy in the way that some American and European films suggest, Berlin cabaret occupied a middle ground that let it cast an ironic eye on the goings-on of Berliners and other Germans. However, it was just this satirical attitude toward serious themes, such as politics and racism, that blinded cabaret to the strength of the radical right-wing forces that ultimately destroyed it. Jelavich concludes with the Berlin cabaret artists' final performances--as prisoners in the concentration camps at Westerbork and Theresienstadt. This book gives us a sense of what the world looked like within the cabarets of Berlin and at the same time lets us see, from a historical distance, these lost performers enacting the political, sexual, and artistic issues that made their city one of the most dynamic in Europe.

Jocelyn, Jennifer, Jodie, Jacqui, Joelle. Ignoring the optimistic advice of elders, these five working-class teens in the Rust Belt band together in their embrace of bad behavior and poor taste as they navigate drugs, sexual assault, unstable homes, financial strain, and closeted queerness, all with loud-mouthed and clear-eyed cynicism. Winner of the 2021 Blue Light Books Prize, Rochelle Hurt's The J Girls: A Reality Show is a tribute to the grit and glitter of millennial girlhood, a testament to its dangers and traumas, and an elegy for adolescent friendships. Hurt's creative, genre-bending mix of poetry, fiction, and screenplay brings the girls to life with poetic performances of monologues, soap opera clips, mock interviews, talk shows, commercials, and even burlesque. Vulgar, rhapsodic language serves as costume and shield, allowing the J Girls to script their own images and project glowing, outsized versions of themselves into the safe space of the TV screen. Campy, trashy, and playful, the J Girls refuse to play a rigged game, opting instead to find joy wherever they can.

"What corporations fear most are consumers who ask questions. Naomi Klein offers us the arguments with which to take on the superbrands." Billy Bragg from the bookjacket.