LEGEND: Viva La Fever

Viva La Fever: Featured legend of Red Hots Burlesque.

We got the opportunity to chat with a beloved local legend this week, and we just want revel in her stories. Sending her all the love! Red Hots Burlesque presents…

VIVA LA FEVER

“The Insatiable” Viva La Fever hit her first burlesque stage in San Francisco in the early ’70s. It was a happy accident that she had even made it to the Bay Area, considering she had agreed to a two-week road trip across the country that started with her being picked up on a street corner in Pittsburgh with a guitar and ended up with an 11-day stint in jail in Vegas before they ended up in San Francisco. Her and her friends dropped acid in memory of a year since Jimi Hendrix’s death, and her friends got back in their van to go back to back to college, but Viva ended up giving up her last semester to become a music teacher to move to Haight Street. When a friend of hers began working at the Follies Theater Viva visited and realized she could do that. She went directly to the manager and was hired, performing her first number to Hendrix’s “Hey Joe” and Janis Joplin’s “Turtle Blues” after downing half a bottle of wine. Besides performing, Viva also learned everything about the production behind the scenes from lights, to curtains, and making tapes for all the girls. She became part of the team with the 16th Street Amusement Company who helped open other burlesque theaters throughout the country during the ’70s. In 1980 Viva took a “straight job” working as a driver for the Chronicle and Examiner in San Francisco. Once in the ’80s two men cornered her between the trucks, and asked her, “Was it true you were a stripper?” She quickly replied, “No, I was THE stripper.” Viva still lives in the Bay Area with her husband. They celebrate their wedding anniversary on Halloween. She performed for the first time since she retired in 1980 for the 2012 Burlesque Hall of Fame. “It’s sort of a sisterhood,” Viva says of burlesque. “Respect your fellow performers.”