Teaching striptease in Philadelphia

Haven't we all had a teacher who begins a new class with a speech like this?

"I don't work at a gentlemen's club and I don't dance on a pole. But I'm definitely a stripper."

That introduction isn't so surprising when the class is the "Fundamentals of Striptease" - an introduction to bumping, grinding, and shimmying - and the instructor's name is Lulu Lollipop.

Courtney Shea, as she's known offstage, directs the Peek-A-Boo Revue, which touts itself as Philadelphia's premier neo-burlesque troupe. She also teaches classes to the burlesque-intrigued - when she's not performing or working as a seamstress' assistant.

The course - at a cost of $95 - may be taught by a professional, but the students on this day have less lofty goals.

"I want to learn how to be sexy," says Emily Duffy, a 21-year-old Temple film student who not long ago joined the revue's pickup crew - meaning she picks up their discarded clothes on stage and flirts with the audience. "It helps boost your self-confidence if you feel like you know what you're doing."

Duffy's friend Amber Scott, 20, an advertising major at Temple, has a decidedly unsexy reason: "It's more fun than my statistics class."

Shea reviews what will be covered during this first of four weekly classes. The bump. The grind. How to show off certain parts of your body. And attitude, an essential component of striptease visible in the framed portraits of burlesque performers at photographer Dale Rio's Studio Noir.

It was Rio, publisher of burlesque magazine Shimmy, who suggested that Peek-A-Boo Revue hold a class in the East Falls space, where she also offers Pin-up 101.

"You have to believe you can do it. You have to believe it looks good," says Shea, 5-foot-5 and 118 pounds, whose black outfit contrasts with her precisely applied bright red lipstick and pressed-powdered cheeks. Somewhere, a production of the musical Chicago is missing a cast member.

"I spent many years being cute," Shea says. "I didn't think sexy worked in this body at all."

She does sexy now, which she demonstrates during a saxophone-heavy recording of "I Love Paris" (in the springtime).

Not a single piece of clothing - not even a thread - will be removed as part of today's class. And although clothing might be shed later in the course, the real stripping happens at the intermediate and advanced levels. Still, Shea is philosophical about the barest parts of her art.

"I'm not trying to get anyone to lust after me. I'm trying to get the audience to be that piece of clothing, to wish at one point, they were that close to me," she says.

It's the tease in striptease.

For the bump, Shea demonstrates by moving her hips sharply to the left and then to the right. The students mimic those movements, and also Shea's grinds, trying to swivel their midsections in a way that looks sensual, not painful.

"You're really pushing your butt out, pushing your pelvis," Shea says. "Stick out your boobs, stick out your boobs! Does it feel different?"

The women answer yes, but not before Scott says, "Oh my God," through a torrent of giggles.

Teaching a striptease class is something Shea, 31, believes is valuable, even though Philadelphia has so many burlesque classes that she pronounces the market here "saturated."

Quantity, she emphasizes, is not quality. People think, " 'I'll just grab a boa and a sexy underwear set and I'll call it burlesque.' Well, you don't understand burlesque and the performers who have come before."

Although burlesque shows - variety shows that include comedy skits - eventually came to include striptease, the two emerged separately.

Rachel Shteir, author of Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show, traces burlesque's origins to brothels and the French cabarets of the 1800s. But it was the British dancer Lydia Thompson and her troupe, the British Blondes, who brought the bawdy entertainment show to the United States in the 1860s.

There are many tales of how striptease started in this country. Some say it was unveiled when a dance act known as Little Egypt performed it during the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Another legend has it that, during the 1920s, a burlesque dancer was onstage when a shoulder strap broke, says Shteir, of DePaul University's Theatre School. The crowd went wild.

Because there was enormous competition among venues putting on burlesque shows, vaudeville productions, and, in 1927, the new "talking movies," women wore less to attract more. And impresarios such as the Minsky Brothers, who had theaters in many U.S. cities, including Philadelphia, put striptease center stage.

Back then, the women who performed it were children of immigrants and mainly hailed from poor, rural communities in the South.

"Many didn't have any education, so this was really the only way they could make money," says Shteir.

Those women, including famed dancer Tempest Storm, tell their stories in a documentary released this year, Behind the Burley Q. (Storm was still performing until June when she slipped in Las Vegas at the Burlesque Hall of Fame's 20th anniversary and fractured a hip.)

"I had a terrible childhood," says Storm, now in her 80s. "I was pulled up into the hills by five guys and raped one by one when I was 14. And I worked in the field, I picked cotton, I chopped cotton," she says.

She vowed she would leave that life; striptease made it possible. Still, in those early years, dancers were considered immoral women.

These days, it's for the mainstream.

Pole-dancing is offered as a fitness class. Neo-burlesque troupes, such as the Peek-A-Boo Revue, aren't uncommon - there are at least three in Philadelphia - and are considered an alternative art form by many. Most of the troupe members have college degrees. Shea would love to do burlesque full-time. (As contestants on the last America's Got Talent, Peek-A-Boo members made it past the televised audition in June only to be vanquished in Vegas.)

As the class nears its end, the students use all the moves they've learned in one last routine, to a song featuring a sleazy trombone. Butts jut out; chests and heads held high.

They have much more to learn - and practice - but they move now with more than a hint of attitude.

"Good job," Shea says. And Scott giggles.