FORMER EVERGREEN PROF'S BURLESQUE DOCUMENTARY >>>

Two years ago Red Vaughan Tremmel taught a course called "Gender and Sexuality: History, Culture, and Politics" at The Evergreen State College - typical Evergreen stuff. Now he's teaching at Tulane University and he's a fellow of Columbia College's Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media Fellowship Program. He's a very busy man. Plus, he's a filmmaker working on an exciting project. Vaughan is in the midst of creating a documentary film on the history of burlesque centered around the world's first and only museum dedicated to the art of the striptease.

The film is called Exotic World & the Burlesque Revival. Lots of footage has already been shot, and there is information, including sample footage, online.

"We just finished doing the voice-over with Margaret Cho and hope to have (the film) completed by this June," he tells me via e-mail.

Burlesque performer Jennie Lee, known as "The Bazoom Girl," and her husband began preparing to build the museum in the Mojave Desert by collecting photos, props, stories and other materials from retired strippers beginning in the late 1950s, but it didn't really come together until the 1980s when she teamed up with another exotic dancer, Dixie Evans, known as "The Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque." The museum was located in an old goat farm in the desert. It was named Exotic World.

Jennie invited strippers to come to the museum and share their experiences. An annual retreat became something of a Mecca for exotic dancers.

Jennie died in 1990, but her husband and Evans kept the museum alive. The annual reunion of strippers that Jennie had started continued and gained fame. Young performers and older retired strippers began to flock to the annual reunions turning the unique museum at the old goat ranch off Route 66 into a national phenomenon. It sparked an international revival of the art of burlesque.

In Exotic World & the Burlesque Revival Red Tremmel has documented the history of burlesque and the revival of the art as seen through the museum.

Exotic World has now been renamed The Burlesque Hall of Fame.