Feb 6th at the Historic Texas Theater with guest Angi Pontani, a live pin up shoot, lots of burlesquey vendors, thrills, and an evening of amazing burlesque dancers. We told you! It's coming!

Dallas Burlesque Festival

It's Coming... Are you ready?

Performer applications are available now. To download go to dallasburlesquefestival.com and download the application, and get it back to us soon! Deadline is January 1st, 2010.

Costume workshop with Renea' Le Roux

Award winning costumer Renea Le Roux will be holding a costuming workshop this Saturday following her no doubt amazing performance on Friday night with Burlesque Nocturne. the workshop will be held at the Stoneleigh hotel in Dallas on Saturday October 24th from 11Am to 1PM. The cost of the workshop is 27.50 and you can register by going to http://www.ladivinaburlesque.com/?page_id=277 to register and pay for your class. Hope to see you on Saturday.

Pastie shop!

We are live on etsy with handmade pasties by me, Black Mariah. You can go to www.blackmariahburlyq.etsy.com to get your own set. Email me if you are looking for custom pasties. I specialize in super spinner pasties with hardware which makes the tassels twirl incredibly easy. I have nearly 20 designs ready but there are only 8 up tonight. I will have the rest of them up by tomorrow evening! I feel like I should have a party and crack open some champagne!

Go get your pastie fix.

UPDATE!

So between getting braces, screwing up a muscle in my back, and booking shows like there isn't one thing wrong at all, has taken a bit of a toll on me. Oh no , don't freak out, I don't plan on slowing down anytime soon. I simply feel that I need to explain why my response time to emails, texts, and messages has been longer than usual.

I'm tired. Period. That's all kids. Im just very exhausted lately, thanks to pain in my back and teeth. It's nothing personal, and please know that I NEVER ignore messages or any sort of contact with me. I will get back to you. It may take a couple of days, But I will get with you soon! And also know that posting this is not to deter anyone from asking me for custom pasties or costume work or burlesque performances. Please keep it coming! Like I said, I never slow down.

I have been catching up on my pastie making this weekend. I hope to have a batch to photograph to upload to my etsy site! However that eased laundry out of the picture. *sigh* I need a maid to help me get caught up on the house work. I can always find much more lucrative things to do than house work.
Kluvyabye!
-Black Mariah

You want Pasties? I got em!

So I finally just went ahead and opened an etsy shop for my pastie creations. I will have various sizes and shaped and there is an option for custom pasties. I don't have anything listed at this moment, but I am going to photograph my inventory and list them all today, so I should have things for you to buy by this evening.

Who wants PASTIES!

Wardrobe malfunction.

So last night I had a first. I put my gloves on for my fan number nad realized one of the piies was still rolled inside of the glove. OH dear. I heard my soundbyte playing and knew I was seconds away from the music starting. I struggled to get the finger out and with my other hand gloved, it was impossible. I sucked it up and got out to my fan chair and just did the number with four gloved fingers on my right hand, and my pinky rolled up against my hand. The strength it took to keep from laughing was amazing. My first glove removal was that right hand and I was sure once I starated taking each finger off with my teeth that everyone would notice I only had four fingers.......not one person caught it.

When clothes give you hell, just keep moving and taking them off.
*wiping brow*

Tidbits

Did you know that I make pasties? Did you know that I make damn awesome pasties?

Did you know that I specialize in "super spinner" pasties?

Yes Ma'am. Guaranteed to spin with ease, all of my super spinners start at $20.00 per pair and once you top that with swarovski's, well you have to call for pricing on those. Here are some scrumptious photos. I make custom shapes and sizes as well. Just so you know. Stop by the merch booth at the Lollies show this weekend and check out my sweet creations. Toppings for your top! You can email me at blackmariahdallas@gmaildotcom if you would like a custom set created just for you. order a set. See the sparkley pictures!

Been a minute

I know you think I am dropping the ball with my blog posts, but the truth is, I have so much to say, that I have to edit my thoughts before I sit down to the keyboard, or I'm a terrible example of "on the brain, out the mouth".

I want this blog to be incredibley uplifting, challenging and positive. I want everyone who reads it to take something away that they did not have or know before. I want so much to influence the Dallas (and anyone else in any city who reads) burlesque scene in a positive way. There are topics that I feel need to be discussed, but I know that someone, somewhere, will take it personally and then there is all the gas poured onto and open flame....lovely. Understand that many of the things I discuss may have been born from real life experience, so yes, the posibility is apparent that I could be referring to a situation that really occured. Its nothing personal, I just think we could, and should, learn from life, because someone lost the manual. So that being said. I promise to address issues and topics in an open, honest, tasteful manner, if everyone promises not to take it personally and send me emails asking if the post is about them or if I am mad at them. K? Luv ya.

First topic up is..........money. We have a shitty economy today and many people are finding themselves without work. In a down economy , we not only have to be frugle with out funds, but also carefully manage our buisness so that it is always creating a great product, and it is always making money.

Burlesque is a business. Period. Whether its your part time, or your full-time, or your second job, it is a business, as opposed to a charity. Anything you do well, you should get paid to do well. Here in Dallas the number of burlesque dancers vying for stage time has more than quadrupled in less than a year. This is great in that many women are taking control of their inhibitions and just going for it. They are following their hearts. The down side to this is that there are more tassle twirlers than you can shake a stick at, all vying for stage time.

My concern is for newer burlesque dancers. The ladies who have debuted within or somewhat around the past year or so. Those ladies are in an awkward position of coming into the performance arena behind many dancers who have already blazed a path of success for themselves. Many will an do feel that they have to "get their name out there" or "get some exposure". Many times Dancers think that they have not earned themselves the right to equal pay with their veteran sisters due to their freshman status. This creates a small vaccuum of potential for "undercutting". Undercutting is the phenomenon that occurs between a vendor providing a service at one price, and a competing vendor providing the same TYPE of service at a much lower price. Notice TYPE is in bold letters as this is to clarify that the two vendors may not provide the exact same product, or even the same quality, but to the client, they are only looking for the end product.

Many new burlesque dancers undercut their competition completely unintentionally, so desperate to get stage time, but feeling like they are not worthy of the pay scale of the veteran performers on the bill. Not true ladies. Once you have begun to invest the time and funds into your craft, you deserve some sort of reimbursement for your effort. Even if it is on the low end of the pay spectrum in your area. Performing for free or for barely any pay at all simpley encourages producers to forfeit the potential hiring of veteran performers who have earned their pay rate through years of performance, to alternately hire someone who will work for pennies. This is the very definition of undercutting, and performers cannot pay their bills or invest in new items for their performance if they are being undercut.

many priducers bank on this phenomenon and love to ask new dancers for a performance in exchange for "exposure". While this is not unheard of as sometimes the exchange rate is well worth the money you would have made for the gig, a dancer SHOULD be reimbursed SOMETHING. Gas, bar tab, valet service, hotel accomidations, just get payment of something. This obligates the producer to take care of his investment. For example, the producer has agreed to pay for your hotel which costs X amount of dollars, when you complain that there is no dressing room per the agreement, said producer will be more likely to accomidate you with a dressing area of some sorts if he just flipped $50 bucks for your gas money, he wants a return on his investment as much as you do. The producer you perform for, with the exchange of only "exposure", will not care what your issue might be with the performance, and has no investment if you decide to walk.

A good producer should never ask any performer, burlesque or no, to perform for exposure, especially when a cover charge is being collected at the door. If you are talent, you need to be paid for it. Period.

There are signs

Yesterday, I went to the gym and upon weighing myself, saw that I had lost another 1.5 pounds for a total of 6 pounds! I rewarded myself with a 3 mile run.

How are you doing in the gym? Are you pushing yourself each visit? Are you drinking plenty of water?

Results are not all from being in the gym. Eating healthy and maintaining a healthy lifestyle of plenty of sleep, exercise and nutrition are all factors in overall physical well being.

Save the Tatas

OK I have 501st Royal Guard on board for this show and he is comin out wearing pink head to toe. I want to see ALL fans of burlesque coming out to support this evening of burlesque to help raise funds for participants in the Susan G Komen 3 Day- 60 mile walk for the Cure! Tickets are $25 dollars this time only to generate the funds these girls need , but we know you guys are there to help us out. You always have been. PLease call the theatre to reserve your seats for the show! Show is August 21st and 22nd.

This is the confessional, Right?

OK I broke up with America's Got Talent and forbid myself from watching More to Love. Guess where my channels were tonight?

A phone call alerted me to a burlesque troupe from San Fransisco named the Lollipop Girls who had made it through on "America's Got Talent". Great, name is close enough, now I have to watch. So Im a channel surfer too, and I flipped the channel during commercials to none other than, More to Love. Ugh.

I have to say, the women on "More to Love" are stunningly beautiful. They make curvy look gorgeous! And I did not see that the show had incorporated a food challenge, which if that happens, I may explode.

Can you follow me?

When I arrived at my gym, I immediately weighed myself to see my progress. I had lost 2 pounds! That was motivation enough to make me run 2 miles. Poured sweat ! I also did a hardcore thigh and glutes strength training while reading People magazine. Multitasking !

Tip: I find it best to weigh in and check my BMI before I work out since I tend to consume massive amounts of water during my workout. That will add weight to the scales as well as make the BMI reading kinda wonky.

Today at the Libertine at 2PM, Burlesque Happy Hour! All tassle twirlers and non tassle twirlers welcome!

More to Love?

http://www.fox.com/moretolove/

Yeah. I know.

The first few promos for this show seemed releatively harmless and benign. The promos including some of the girls confessions or one on ones totally did me in fo this show.

Now look, Im not a big reality show person at all. I like the dance/talent shows, which is a given because I am a dancer. Frustrating as they are I still watch them, and swear I will quit them at the end of each season. I LOVE COPS. Good guy wins every time. These shows about finding love, or having a camera in your bathroom, or following kids who are 16 and pregnant, not so much. I digress.

Fox's promos that include the girls on camera confessions or interviews just KILLED it for me. I haven't even seen the show and I am already offended! The premise of finding love , on a TV show, on camera, when you only have 20 to choose from is mind boggling to me. I am married and I swear I had to date every jerk in my area code before I found a really good one. To take the love on tv premise one step further and make the show about "full figured women", well I might have watched until the montage of the women speaking about how difficult it is to find love when you are larger sized woman.....Really? No it's not. The tag lines for the show insinuate that this show will PROVE that full size people can find love. Aww thats sweet. Wait but the bachelor is a large guy? So what are they saying. Pair the fatties together and the skinnies together? Um are they saying the full figured women have dug through the barrel and all they can get is the big guy? WTF? Love isn't blind. It's produced, packaged and promoed to suspend your disbeleif! I certainly hope none of the larger women I know are going ot buy into this crap. Please do not buy into the hype. Love is no harder to find for a full figured woman than it is for anyone else. We all have some sort of handicaps that potential mates must contend with or accept. Bad skin, bad teeth, bad credit, ex- wives with children, any of the above are superficial but on some level, a reason for or against dating someone. Holy crap, let's just set society back about 20 years. Hey maybe next season they can have a BLACK Bachelor or Bachelorette! No one has thought of THAT before! Then maybe they can paint a picture of how difficult it is for african americans to find love. No wait, we had "Flavor of Love." At least the parade of women on THAT show was diverse.

The jury is still out on "Biggest Loser". It is a very inspiring show, but I'm still not convinced that anyone can lose that much weight without some sort of skin tucking surgery. I know better because extra skin after extreme weight loss IS REALITY!

A Better You

I think fear is a sad motivator, but a very real one. I am the "curvy girl" of burlesque here in Dallas and I am proud to carry that torch. I do not, however, want to give young ladies the impression that "curvy" is an excusable term to be used in place of obese.

I have a new goal. I have begun a workout regiment and I want to represent a healthy full figured woman for my fans. So starting now I am going to post my workouts and how it is affecting my shape and wieght loss/ muscle growth.

No more excuses. I am an asthmatic overweight girl and I am going at it full steam. I dont want you ladies to hurt yourselves, so lets all take it slow at first. our goal will be to work up to 60 minutes a day. 60 minutes of moderate, heart rate increasing excercise. If you ahve never workedout before maybe begin with 2 30 minutes sessions at a time. Walking is a good start becaise everyone can do that. I am also looking into http://www.shapefit.com/workout-questions-hiit-cardio.html which is a HIIT workout. Its very intense we will begin at four minutes to begin with. You will be surprised at how exausting even four minutes will be.

SO far with cardio and weight lifting I have lost 2 pounds. Its a start. I want to get rid of the buddhaa belly I have developed from being out of the gym after I ripped my shoulder.

I also got braces. Nothing like saving your akward period for your thirties. Thankfully I have had tem on a week and I can already tell that teeth are moving around. Good stuff!

-Mariah

Shaping your universe

To shimmy, to shake, to thrust, to arebesque (sp?)........what's a girl in pasties to do with herself at a buffet of dance ready for our own interpretations?

So being the "curvy girl" in the Dallas burlesque scene, I see myself as a dancer that wants much more technique in her life, but am limited by the lack of training. I took dance when I was younger, much younger. It was a natural progression as I think I have been wiggling and gyrating since I could walk. I grew up watching MTV, Solid Gold, and American Bandstand, emulating the pop stars and dancers I loved. My mom was a single mom, so needless to say, she was out a lot, working sometimes two jobs. Now we condemn mothers for letting the TV babysit their children. For me, Time alone with the the boob tube of sensory overload was the best thing that ever happened to me.

So back to dance class. Once there was a little girl with a terrible case of asthma that desperately wanted to be so active but was limited by the limp lungs. I begged and pleaded with my mother to allow me to take 2 dance classes over the summer. I took jazz and tap. Don't laugh. I never missed a class and at the end of the year we had recital. It was BIG DEAL. We were performing at the historic Tennessee Theater. The theater was huge, the backstage area was endless. I was so excited and wondered if I could live up to the prestige of the Tennessee Theater (yeah I was 9, didn't really get that this was probably going to only be parents) So our teachers lined us up to measure us for our costumes. I don't know where I was in line, but I remember the teacher strapping the measuring tape around my waist and hips and dropping her voice in this judgemental tone to blurt out "Adult SMALL". I was mortified. I was only 9 and I hadn't paid any mind to the sizes the other girls fell into, but her tone and attitude told me that the size I fell into was perfectly unacceptable. I didn't think I was chubby, er maybe I was. If I was, I wasn't aware of it until right then, with 11 other sets of eyes gawking at me.

OH this wasn't written as a pity story, so don't fret. Yes it's sad, but you should have seen the costume that tart made us wear. THAT was the real tragedy. Black Spandex crop pants with neon hot pink sequin trim around the bottom. The waist was so huge, it must have come up to just below by nonexistent bewbs. then there was the top. OH GOD! Black and white zebra print tunic with the same neon hot pink trim around the waist and sleeves. It was cut huge, super baggy, not unlike anything else in the 80's. Seems like there was a neon pink headband but I may have trauma blocked that. Headband as in around the forehead, not one that would be utilitarian in holding ones hair back and in place. Hideous. And then those horrible black jazz shoes. GAG! I was the whitest person in Tennessee and wearing zebra print, black pants and black shoes. The horror.

Truth is I have resented that moment in my life. For a long time I resented that teacher for making a child feel like she wasn't worthy of the stage for something as petty as her size. Then I was angry with myself, for giving that teacher permission to make me feel like I wasn't good enough, and not going back the next semester and proving that hag wrong.

Many moons have passed and I am now thankful that moment happened to me. It was a moment that showed me how shallow people can be, and that not everyone who works with children, should. That moment made me who I am. Yes I didn't go back. I wished I had stuck with dance and maybe I would be amazing today. Maybe not. Maybe technique would not have been the end result. Maybe I would have walked away from that experience a shallow, self absorbed creature with no sensitivity to the frailty of others. I am still the curvy girl, and I was meant to be so. I am sure that if I were the same size as many other dancers, I would just be another face in the crowd.

Sometimes the biggest and best impressions are left by those who AREN'T in our lives.

Love yourselves. Love your body. Love the story your body needs to tell and tell it like Shakespeare would have. Seek the people who will uplift you without putting others down . Become the best you that you could ever hope to be.

Love,
Mariah

All the Cool Kids are doing it.

I didnt mean to make a blog, it was an accident. I meant to comment on my friend Vivienne's post, but here I am. I guess it was inevitable.