Legend: Jennie Lee

Jennie Lee: Featured Legend of Red Hots Burlesque

This week’s legend has a special place in our hearts at Red Hots Burlesque!

JENNIE LEE

d. March 24, 1990

Jennie Lee was even more than a legendary burlesque figure known as the uncontested “Bazoom Girl”: this twinkling lady was the brains and bosom behind the Burlesque Hall of Fame. During Lee’s first performance as a stag dancer, she was so shy at curtain call that she hid in a closet until all of the audience had left the building. Though she tried to break into mainstream acting, Lee was known during her career as a dancer for her dazzling and dizzying speeds that she spun her tassels. The reunions of exotic dancers began when she spearheaded a union in the mid-’50s for exotic dancers The Exotic Dancers’ League of North America, who began by seeking better pay for strippers in L.A., at the time the lowest paying major city in the U.S. From this Lee created a bowling team of dancers (The Barecats) and eventually started collecting memorabilia like photos, g-strings, and pasties from the greats of burlesque, moving them out to a goat farm in Helendale, California. This is where the Burlesque Hall of Fame received its humble beginnings. Lee died of cancer in 1990, but has left a rich legacy for all burly dancers who make the mecca out to Vegas for BHOF each year.