CHRISTOPHER WOOD: OFF DAY 8 â€" A WINK AND A SMILE >>>

Nothing brings people together quite like nudity. Lines that went on like a dancer’s legs converged at Capitol Theater’s box office. Moviegoers occupied almost every seat in the house for a late-night peep at Washington filmmaker Deirdre Allen Timmons’s debut, the burlesque documentary A Wink and a Smile.

The evening proved more than just a cheap thrill. The opening short, apparently from the gay (18)90s, reveals several females undressing on a stage. The film’s excessive grain keeps specific, ahem, details of the ladies’ performances tantalizingly out of sight. But then, as Timmons’s colorful work comes to show, burlesque is about performance itself, the journey viewers and viewed take together.

Former stripper Miss Indigo Blue runs an academy in Seattle. Her goal: teach willing students the art of shedding clothes publicly. Indigo’s 2007 class hails from a surprisingly diverse range of ages, body types and occupations. Crowds enjoyed the buxom taxidermist who, like a polite hostess, presents the camera with a veritable buffet of roadkill chilling in her freezer. There’s also Diane, a bubbly, bitty mother in her 50s who joins the academy with the solemn oath to “bring back the beauty of sagging breasts.”

The gals have only six weeks to find sparkly costumes and nail down their sexy routines. While Indigo patiently guides her ladies through the intricacies of the pasty, some suffer doubt and insecurity. Another drops out altogether. Yet the film paints a loving, rhinestone-studded portrait of them all. The empowered sisterhood that forms from this taboo art form peels away conventional (mis)conceptions about sexuality and bravely sheds society’s obsession with the ideal female form.

Wink’s director and several members of the cast arrived for Q&A; the laughter they and the audience shared felt like banter between old friends. “If I walked away from this film with one nugget,” reflects Timmons, “it’s that…you just have to abandon fear and chase whatever it is you want to do.” I’ll wink to that.

LINK: Final day at the Olympia Film Festival

LINK: ViVA South Sound arts and entertainment calendar