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Karen Pulfer Focht
Velvetina on Beale Street, Memphis, Tennessee © Karen Pulfer Focht
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Karen Pulfer Focht
© Karen Pulfer Focht
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Karen Pulfer Focht
© Karen Pulfer Focht
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Karen Pulfer Focht
© Karen Pulfer Focht
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Karen Pulfer Focht
© Karen Pulfer Focht
The fancy bra is unhooked and launched through the air landing, if you’re lucky, right next to your Sazerac. But don’t touch; the show rolls on as whistles, whoops, and yips burst from the audience along with Memphis music from the band at Mollie Fontaine Lounge. Velvetina Taylor winks, moues, and cracks wise through the routine.
The burlesque scene in Memphis is not as robust as in, say, New Orleans, but Taylor saw an opportunity to bring her Blue Moon Revue to town. She bumps and grinds with the best of them, but beyond the shimmy, she’s also an entrepreneur, a devoted rider of her 1200cc Harley-Davidson, and has a master’s degree in library & information studies from University College Dublin. She’s not just about corsets, boas, eyelashes, and pasties, although she assuredly knows how to pull it off.
The show is, as Taylor says, “super classic, traditional, glamorous, big crazy rhinestone feather costumes.”
Taylor performs and produces steadily in New York when she’s not straddling her motorcycle and crisscrossing the country with her Pistons and Pasties Tour. She stopped in Memphis in 2016 and was smitten. When the impresario in her decided to produce a show outside of the Big Apple, she chose Memphis.
“I thought there were several reasons why a regular show might work here,” she says. “There’s a nightlife — people going out with focused attention, usually on live music. Also, Memphis is a destination. If I could include that with the Memphis musicians, I could get some of those people to come.”
Her revue opened its run in April, is going three nights a week, and plans are to run through September. There are different dancers from around the country every week and bands rotate monthly. That local live music is cream of the crop: Marcella Simien, Amy LaVere, Albert King Jr. so far. July’s music is from John Paul Keith.
The show is, as Taylor says, “super classic, traditional, glamorous, big crazy rhinestone feather costumes.” She jokes during the introductions and lays out the rules for the evening (no flash photography, make lots of noise). An audience member may be plucked away from one of the sofas to be in a skit. Fret not — Taylor will be gentle, for she is an artist, even in dishabille, at the top of her game.
Karen Pulfer Focht
© Karen Pulfer Focht
