Legend: Holiday O’Hara

Holiday O’Hara: Featured Legend of Red Hots Burlesque

One of our favorite San Francisco legends, this lady celebrates her birthday this week, and we celebrate her! Can’t wait to see her performing at Burlesque Hall of Fame!

HOLIDAY O’HARA
b. May 21, 1949

It was evident that Holiday O’Hara, “The Lady Who Loved to Love You,” was going to be a burlesque dancer from the tender age of ten. “My mother found me dancing in the mirror humming and dancing with a towel with a hole in it, playing peekaboo with my naughty parts,” Holiday told Red Hots Burlesque over the phone. When she was 17 a friend asked her to do a quick fill in for her go go job at the Combat Zone in Boston, and Pixie, Holiday’s first performer name, was born. Within a year Pixie was a hippie panhandling in San Francisco, living in weekly hotel. A guy came into the hotel lounge where Pixie was watching TV and smoking dope, and said he was desperate for a girl to dance. She hustled up a pair of heels and made $25 her first night. That money went to a fake id, and Pixie was officially employed as a go go dancer in San Francisco. Eventually bored with go go dancing, she began her stripping career at The Shakery in the Tenderloin, admiring performers like Magdalena Lopez (a 63-year-old who told people she was 45) and her mentor Tori Lynn. It was here that she shed the childhood nickname Pixie, and eventually became Holiday, after singer Billie Holiday. She performed at the same time as local legend and “exquisite dancer” Isis Starr. “I’d stop whatever I was doing to watch her,” Holiday said of Isis. Her advice to current burlesque performers is that if you want to make a living of dancing, “practice, practice, practice. I want to see more spectacle, I want to see more show.” Of her career, Holiday says, “I went very far for a woman with small breasts. I would leave my bra on and take my g string off first… I connect with my audience, and always had the ability to connect. I love what I do.”