Michelle: Speaking of Dixie, have you ever been out to Exotic world?

Tura: No, but I have pictures of Jenny Lee & I together on the set of "Irma La Deuce." And, Jenny Lee came on the set and did an interview. That was when we were both voted among the "Ten best undressed."

(Michelle orders her third drink, Rita starts in with the drunken trombone music, Tura laughs)

Michelle: This is when I get down to the nitty gritty!

Tura: I'm not like that. I just smell a cork and I'm loaded.

Rita: I'm a lightweight too.

Michelle: Oooh well I'm a big drunkard! Our very first interview was Russ Meyer, and when we started in 1995, we had to explain to everyone what burlesque was. When we told Russ that we were doing a burlesque show, he said, "I don't think burlesque will ever come back with all this hard-core stuff the girls have to do today."

Tura: That's true.

Michelle: But it is making a huge comeback!

Tura: Now people realize that seeing a girls cooch, or seeing her doing a lap dance on somebody - that's not talent. People wanna see talent; they want to see a performance. If you want to see a porno, you can rent one!

Rita: There's definitely a crowd for that, but we don't cater to them. Our audience wants to be entertained.

Tura: Which to me, has always been my big goal.

Michelle: Tell us about some of your numbers...

Tura: When I had my show, I carried a Buddha with me. A big stage Buddha. He was in a velvet-lined case, and he had a step that came down. There was a tray that he held in his hands that held fire. I don't even know where it is anymore! I had swords, big kimonos, and big huge obis. That was one of my first ones, and it was a fun costume to wear. The undergarments were all beaded. The panels, the g-string, the fringe.

Michelle: So, you started dancing when you were 15?

Tura: No, I started dancing when I was 10. My first professional dancing was when I was 15. It was interpretive dance but I did mostly acrobatics. My dad started teaching me martial arts, and I incorporated that into my routine. The moves were so flowing and so classic, it fit in with what I was doing. Especially when I was working with a samurai sword. It was a lot of fun.

Michelle: Do you have any footage of any of your performances?

Tura: There's only one person that ever filmed my routine - a projectionist. He was supposed to give me a tape, but he never did.

Michelle: So you don't have any footage of your dancing?

Tura: There is only one that has some of my dancing in it, and that was the Doll Squad.

Michelle: Yesterday, right before I was working up the nerve to call you, I was flipping around the channels and caught "Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed?" There was this scene where Elizabeth Montgomery, Dean Martin and Carol Burnet were in a Tijuana strip joint and they cut to a dancer and I thought; "Wow she is sooo hot!" And then I realized "Oh my God, that's Tura! I gotta call her! You did this great backbend move and flipped up on to your feet - it was so great!

Tura: Oh yeah, well, they have the whole routine, because they filmed it all. They cut it to put it in the film. I also did the choreography for Carol Burnett's routine. It was quite hilarious, working with her. It was a real kick in the head. Everybody that was in that film was so great!

Rita: Dean Martin was so great.

Tura: Oh yeah. He was such a great guy to work for. The funny part was a section when they wanted a reaction from him, watching me dance. I'm off camera, and they're doing his close-up. The director, Danny Mann, was a friend of mine. He wanted me to get a reaction out of Dean. I said, "Well, what kind of reaction do you want?" "I want his eyes to pop out!"

Michelle: you were also in "Irma La Duce", what was it like to work with Shirley Maclaine?

Tura: It was a gas. She's an old chorus girl. She's a fun gal to work with. I'm kinda strange like her, I believe in the after life.

(Tura now begins to speak Japanese with the waiter, and he's clearly smitten)

Tura: All the girls that were in Irma La Deuce were dancers or entertainers of some kind. In between takes w'd go off and be puttin' on our own show! But, stuff like that is so much fun to do. When we did that film it was almost like a lifetime job. We were on that thing for 4 or 5 months.

Michelle: You started in burlesque at such a young age, how did you get turned on to it?

Tura: Actually, I started out as a legitimate dancer in a strip club, in Calumet City and I had started working in a couple of clubs in Chicago. Sally Rand was working in one called the Brass Rail, and Carrie Finnell - she was the one who could pop her boob out of her dress and then twirl her tassle - while she was singing! Carrie was a real heavyset lady that had a real Sophie Tucker voice. She'd be singing songs, doing one-liners, and all of a sudden, a boob would pop out! This goes back, these were the gals were the headliners back then. I learned from watching them. Finnell always told me: "You've got talented boobs, so train em! So I did! (laughs). She told me that if I ever became a stripper, I'd do well. That started me thinking.... They never knew I was only 15.

Michelle: I wanna hear about the dirty underbelly of burlesque. I wanna hear about the rivalries and cat fights!

Tura: There was only one person I ever had a real big rivalry with, and that was Princess DoMay, the Cherokee half-breed. She was as dumb as a rock, let me tell you. She always carried a guy around with her. But she was the headliner in the first burlesque theater I ever worked in, in St. Louis, Mo, at the Follies Theater. My first time there, I was, like, the "Extra Added Attraction". The co-headliner was "Stunning Smith," a really pretty lady, and really classy. Everything she wore was purple: her lipstick, hair, all of her gowns were purple. Really stunning. She knew that it was my first time, and she took me off to the side and told me "Don't just stay in the front of the stage. That's the stage out there. Use every square inch of it. With the routine you've got, you could do that very easily." I used to do a lot of my acrobatics down on the runway. This is when you could actually get down and actually talk to the audience. Princess DoMay would come out for the finale and walk so her boobs would bounce. Well, mine do that naturally. So, she got ticked off at me. I was backstage and she came up behind me, and with her fingernails just clawed me (indicates to her breasts). And I said "What the hell’d you do that for?" And she said, "When you go out on that stage, your boobs DON'T BOUNCE." I said, "Unless I strap them down, they're gonna bounce, whether I want them to or not." "Well, they better not!" I told her, "Don't you ever lay your hands on me again" and I popped her one. So her suitcase pimp comes up from behind and tries to grab me! You DON'T ever grab me from behind, cuz I'll send ya flying! So he goes flying into someone's dressing room door. I told him "Don't EVER come up behind me and put your hands on me, unless you wanna die!" So she says, "You can't do this to me!" "You wanna bet?" So I took her and just swung her, and threw her right across the green room. There's always a green room in every burlesque theater. She had to go to the hospital. I told her "You should learn a little class, lady. I don't care if you show 'em your snatch, or whatever, but what takes talent is being able to keep your audience interested." Whenever I followed her (on the circuit) into a burlesque theater, all the bands would be waiting to see what kind of bitch I was going to be. And when they found out that I wasn't one, they'd say, "Wow, you're not at all like she said you were going to be!" It got to the point where it was funny.

Rita: She should've just been satisfied with being the headliner....

Tura: The thing was, that shortly after I was her extra-added attraction, I became a headliner. Then I started becoming a headliner ahead of her. We never worked together ever again, but her following started going down, down, down, and she'd show more and more. Pretty soon she was showing her ovaries.

Michelle: Was there a big problem with dancers stealing other dancers acts?

Tura: No. In order to be a headliner, you had to have some kind of attraction, a gimmick. Tempest Storm, hers was her big boobs. She's done the same thing all her life - she just walks around.

Michelle: Yeah, she was never one of my favorites.

Michelle: Dixie told us a story about Evangeline the Oyster Girl. She got really pissed off at this gal that did an underwater act. She'd roll a big tank full of water onto the stage and strip underwater. One night, Evangeline came out with an ax and hacked it while the girl was inside it! Someone from LIFE MAGAZINE was there and shot it, and it ran in the magazine.

Rita: So we are interested in some of the shenanigans...

Tura: Oh that one! I wound up breaking her arm! She was supposedly the tough of the street, she was the one that if you were a newcomer, you'd either have to fall in line with her or you were an outcast. Well, she and I were working in the same club together, and she and I eventually... well, I tried to back off because I didn't want any problems, but she pushed me a little to far one day. We got into a big, big scuffle. There was a big, black mama that was backstage, in the club named Big Mary. Big Mary was back there putting the costumes away. I had come offstage and Kitty was getting ready to go on, and she was giving me some really bad lip, and she just hauled off and shoved me for some reason. That was the beginning of the end. She and I got into a big fight. Wardrobe got all over the place. Big Mary was hiding in the closet; she didn't want to get hurt. We literally tore up that dressing room. We broke mirrors and everything else. And, I wound up taking her to the hospital after I broke her arm, because I felt bad about it. I really did. I didn't want to break her arm. I told her not to push me. She knew better than to ever do that again! She and I became the best of friends. After a while, I didn't have to fight anybody, because she used to fight 'em for me! It goes back quite a long time ago.

Michelle: Since burlesque has been making a resurgence these days, there's been certain rivalries brewing up naturally, but nothing to cry about - total kid stuff. I want to tell them, "You should have seen what our predecessors where doing. This bad mouthing and griping over the Internet is chicken shit!" We are interrupted by the waiter, offering up a menu of decadent deserts.

Tura: Back then, it was so much easier to live. People were people. They didn't give you that phoney crap.

Rita:: I think that's why there's a burlesque resurgence - people miss uniforms, politeness, formalities etc...

Tura: When I was dancing, I was also known as the only person who could twirl my tassels lying on my back. I could stop one, and make it change directions, and stop the other one and make it change directions.

Michelle: Do you need a large bosom to do those kinds of tricks? Could I train my little boobettes?

Tura: Oh yes! You could do it just by bouncing up and down, basically. To be able to get the muscle moving here, is where you can really get the control.

Rita: THIS IS NOT GOING INTO THE ARTICLE - IT'S TOO GOOD.

Michelle: Strike it from the record.

Tura: Most of my tassels, 9 times out of 10 were the size of most girl's bras! We had one gal that was working at the Losers Club, and she held it up and it was the size of a bra.

Michelle mentions that she's still nervous, Tura offers to adjust her back. She smiles at Tura coyly.

Tura: I often wonder how I ever became a stripper, because I was never uninhibited. I was always a very introverted person, until they made me angry, then I became an extroverted person.

We ask the charming waiter to take our photo

Rita now has to mess with the camera for waaay to long, and Tura is very patient. Success. The waiter now takes our photo.

Rita:: I hope that one's a keeper.

Michelle: Anton LaVey wouldn't let us take his picture.

Tura: Why not?

Rita:: He was an old time carnival performer. He believed in keeping up the mystique. He also wouldn't let us record him, so I had to borrow a laptop and try and type everything that he said...

Michelle: It was before we all had computers. We wound up going to the San Francisco wax museum and we took pictures with his wax figure instead; they're hysterical! He said next time we visited him we could take a few snaps but unfortunately he died and we never got to see him again. To the best of my knowledge, that was the last interview he ever did.

Rita: He also had us meet him at the stroke of midnight.

Michelle: He was very theatrical. He had a manservant show us into the parlor and as we were sitting there, getting ready to meet him all of a sudden, he seemed to appear like a puff of smoke! He literally just appeared in the room out of thin air. It was spine tingling, so much fun. He was refreshingly warm & down to earth however.

After the interview, he even played some of the tunes he would play for the dancers in the burlesque houses on his Hammond such a rare treat!!!

Tura: It sounds a lot like interviewing Bela Lugosi. He was giving you the whole showman routine...

Rita: Which is such a dying art.

Michelle: We don't want to take up anymore of your time - this has been just fantastic!

the end!

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