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| Excerpt from The ABC Double D's of Burlesque |
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| Excerpt from The ABC Double D's of Burlesque |
About Dustin M. Wax
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| Photo by Dani Blanchette |
Dustin M. Wax is a cultural anthropologist and the Executive Director at the Burlesque Hall of Fame. An anthropologist by training, he has taught anthropology and women’s studies at both the community college and university levels. He has worked extensively in the museum and nonprofit worlds, with stints at the University of Nevada Las Vegas Barrick Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Jewizsh Museum, as well as the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. His research interests include artistic production, the history of anthropology, gender roles and sexual identity, and the representation of culture and identity in scientific literature, museums, and the mass media. He is the author of Don’t Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College and editor of Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War: The Influence of Foundations, McCarthyism, and the CIA.
Dustin has also been active in attempts to use the Internet to improve and broaden research and education, and is a founding contributor to the anthropology site Savage Minds, selected as one of the 20 Best Science Blogs by Nature in 2006. From 2007-2010, he was the managing editor at the personal productivity site lifehack.org, a Technorati Top 100 blog, where he wrote about writing, learning, studying, project management, technology, and other topics in personal development.
For more information on his teaching, research, and writing, please check out his portfolio.
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| Photo by Dani Blanchette |
From its humble beginnings as the personal collection of Jennie Lee, the legendary tassel-twirler who first dreamed of a “Burlesque Hall of Fame” in the early 1950s, to its present-day incarnation as the world’s largest and most important archive of vintage burlesque ephemera, The Burlesque Hall of Fame has been one of the world’s only institutions dedicated to preserving the art, artifacts and traditions of this uniquely modern art form.
It was Jennie’s wish that this institution not only honour burlesque’s memory, but also its future. A founding member of the Exotic Dancers League, she was devoted to keeping “the girls” together. As such, in addition to her dream of a world class museum, Jennie’s plans for the Hall of Fame included affordable housing for retired dancers, as well as a school for aspiring stripteasers, who could train there alongside Burlesque’s remaining greats.
Unfortunately, Jennie passed away before she was able to see her dream realized. However, thanks to her dear friend and fellow entertainer, Dixie Evans, it was far from lost. For 15 years after Jennie’s death in 1990, Dixie took up Jennie’s mantle, creating a museum in Helendale, CA, that became a pilgrimage site for not only previous generations of performers but the new generation of “neo-burlesque” performers looking to the past as a model for their own futures.
In 2006, the Burlesque Hall of Fame relocated from Helendale to Las Vegas, NV, in hopes of establishing a permanent, first-rate tourist attraction and research/exhibition space for their one-of-a-kind collection. Today, the museum occupies a space in the Emergency Arts building in the heart of a revitalized Vegas Downtown, where a small part of their several-thousand-piece collection is on display to the public.
@ABCDoubleDs
