“Gotta Love the Mind Boner”: An Interview with Sizzlin’ Liz and Susan the Burgundy Bullet of Whiskey

Though I’d never before met Susan the Burgundy Bullet and Sizzlin’ Liz—both of Ithaca-based burlesque troupe Whiskey Tango Sideshow—I spotted them the moment I entered Firehouse Coffee in Candor. Susan, petite with a powerful presence and black fishnet under her red top, and Liz— glamourous and gorgeous in vintage silk animal print with bright red lips; both women exude humor and confidence. It is clear who the burlesquers in the room are.

They are preparing for the third annual Empire Burlesque Festival, two days and nights celebrating all things burlesque in Upstate New York. Whiskey Tango Sideshow is hosting the event, but they are not the headliners, and they predate the festival itself by several years.

“It started with a fan dance at a 20s party,” Susan recalls of her beginnings in burlesque. “Then it was, ‘This is the most fun I’ve ever had in my life.’”

When she decided to form a troupe, she and the other founding member “handpicked girls from Ithaca who [they] knew would be amazing onstage.” From there, their rise to “local stardom” felt easy.

All of the women of Whiskey Tango had previous lives as dancers, singers, comedians, seamstresses, or entertainers in nightlife. With their array of talents, they combined their powers to create something greater than the sum of their parts.

As a founding member, Susan brought her lifelong dance practice to her performance, and another skill that is vital to the true art of burlesque. “I’ve sewn my entire life, since I was a child.” She was doing professional seamstress work for “fetish stuff” and fetish stage performance, “like sewing wedding dresses for people who wanted a wedding dress out of black vinyl versus white chiffon.”

With Whiskey Tango, she does a lot of the costuming; she’s able to visualize pieces just by looking at a ream of fabric. And these costumes are more than decorative; they are mechanical. When she’s designing, Susan has to consider “not only making it look wonderful, but having it work the way you want. You may want to start in a short dress and have a long gown come out. The mechanics of that is something we all enjoy.”

Liz’s background is in music; she is a classically trained vocalist, but she decided to “go for the farm” and become a fulltime grape farmer and winemaker at her family’s Leidenfrost Vineyards on Seneca Lake. In terms of performance, her concentration has shifted as well. “Whiskey Tango was a wonderful way for me to channel my creativity and my talent. And now, I’m more of a dancer than a singer. I was very shy when I first started. Now I don’t give a fuck. Now I’m the saucy one.”

Both women were born and raised in the Finger Lakes Region; Susan worked on her parents’ organic farm for a decade. “We’re country girls,” says Liz, who joined the group at 19 and has been performing with them for the past nine years. “We live the country life.”

All of the troupe members work other jobs, each involving a level of entrepreneurship and independence, which allows them to devote time and energy to Whiskey Tango. Robin Rhinestone (her Whiskey Tango name) owns the luncheonette in which we are sitting during this interview. Susan works for a small mineral makeup company based out of Trumansburg, which sponsors all their makeup. “I can go in a say, ‘Actually, we need this,’ and my boss just makes it.”

“[We have] custom costumes, custom makeup. We have a woman in our group who’s a professional stylist,” says Liz. Susan finishes her sentence: “And so she styles our wigs, and our hair.” These details exemplify the spirit of what modern burlesque is all about: presenting and performing as something that is completely your own creation.

At its root, burlesque simply refers to a literary, dramatic, or musical piece that lampoons conventions. But because of modern connotations, Whiskey Tango didn’t always identify as such. “In the beginning,” Susan recalls, “we wanted to move away from being burlesque, because we didn’t always have a sexy reveal; a lot of times it was a more comical reveal, or a male-to-female reveal, and stuff like that. We were trying not to sell it as a sexy show, in the beginning, because I think we were getting our toes wet.”

“Also,” Liz chimes in, “there wasn’t a big burlesque scene at that point.”

“People didn’t know what burlesque was,” Susan concurs. “And so then, because it grew so much, in a social way, it was easy for us to say we are burlesquers now, and we’ve become more brazen, too. And I think, for me, burlesque is about telling your story. Everybody’s story is different, too, which is the best part about it.”

“We’re not just coming out in a red-and-black thing and taking our glove off to a horny horn song,” Liz explains. “We do thinking pieces, [and] we do pieces that have really miraculous rip-aways. We do pieces that sometimes are emotional or that challenge the convention of what it means to be a ‘good girl’ in today’s society.”

“Or what’s sexy,” Susan inserts. “I love it when I’m standing onstage next to Erin—who is literally a foot and a half taller than me—and our bodies are completely different. I love how we represent that onstage.”

“We’re really real,” Liz asserts. “We’re not like a caricature of a women—we actually are real women with dirty hands.”

Their range of performance style varies as much as their skill sets and stature, and the troupe carefully considers their audience when crafting a show. Depending upon their location and venue, they may decide to perform boundary-pushing pieces, or to bring out the gracefully seductive glove-and-gown numbers. “It’s great to have that kind of burlesque that is mainstream enough,” says Liz “If anything, that’s the gateway to being curious about other kinds of burlesque.”

She continues, reflecting upon their audiences: “Everybody’s different; everybody’s looking for a different kind of entertainment. Some people go for the costumes; some people go for the naked tits. Some of our strongest supporters are people that aren’t sexualizing us, that are our fans because of our costumes or our emotive personalities.”

“Or our silly side,” says Susan. “There’s a woman [in our troupe] who does a great fan dance to car alarm noises.”

In popular culture, burlesque has largely been depicted as a choreographed striptease without much subversion or deep, personal expression. “Some people can’t digest the depths of black burlesque, and get down to the nitty gritty and enjoy the types of performance that we see in some of the bars in Coney Island. Some people want to see Christina Aguilera,” Liz concedes. “We do all of the above. We have routines where we all come out in matching outfits with red bows and we have fans and we’re so cute, and then we have Erin burning an effigy of the Twin Towers.” She goes on to clarify, “Not in the same show, though; not at the same venue.”

“We have to be respectful and do routines that are meaningful to us,” she elucidates. “We try to speak to our experiences. I did an anti-fracking [routine]. It was for Clean Water Initiative, right around the time that the fracking and the LPG facility was coming into Seneca Lake.”

The women of Whiskey Tango continue to expand their repertoire in new directions and test the limits of their form. “I’m starting to do sideshow stuff,” shares Liz, “and [Susan] is starting to do fire performance.”

Which includes, as Susan mentions, “light-on assels.” For the less burlesque-savvy, these are tassels for your ass.

“It’s actually easier to twirl an assel than it is to twirl a tassel,” notes Liz.

Audiences can enjoy the myriad talents of Whiskey Tango Sideshow—as well as burlesque acts from throughout the greater region and beyond—at the Empire Burlesque Festival this year. The past two years’ festivals sold out the 800-seat Hangar Theater each night, and they are looking forward to another amazing turnout.

“We love to work with other performers, and there are some exceptional performers around here,” Susan beams.

“We try to celebrate Upstate New York,” explains Liz. “We’re not competing with other festivals; we’re just the upstate hub.”

The show consists of 20 unique acts each night. True to burlesque tradition, most of the performances are solos, but this year there are four or five group acts other than Whiskey Tango, a first for the festival. And there will be some guys performing as well. “We’re always trying to hook up with boylesque acts,” says Susan.

There are also four workshops, two of which will be hosted by headline performers, including Naughty Knee-Slapping Burlesque with Mini Tonka and Burlesque Administration 101.

When it comes to organizing the festival, Liz shares: “We both vibe off of each other and make it happen.” She handles most of the out-of-troupe stuff, while Susan takes care of the in-troupe duties. “I think the reason why we’ve stuck around for so long is because we’re figured out how to harness this creative power we have as a group.”

Throughout this conversation, I’ve had trouble keeping from fantasizing about getting onstage for my own song-and-dance number. I ask if they have any advice for aspiring burlesque performers. “Do it,” Susan urges. “Give it a try and do it. And we’re going to be having classes up in the studio, I hear. Do it, and make it your own.”

Susan went on to express the satisfaction she derives from performing routines that make people think. “Gotta love the mind boner.”

I wonder how they come up with such creative ideas for costumes and numbers. Susan’s answer is concise: “Marijuana.”

“And we’re strong business owners,” Liz adds. “I respectfully decline alcohol a lot because I work around it.”

“If I could give everybody a joint instead of a PBR,” admits Susan, “I would.”

Whiskey Tango Sideshow presents the third annual Empire Burlesque Festival on Friday, April 6 and Saturday, April 7. Featuring 30 performers from across the globe, including headliners Bella Blue of New Orleans and NYC’s Perle Noire, in two nights of burlesque, cabaret and sideshow entertainment. Doors at 7, showtime at 8pm. To purchase nightly tickets or discounted weekend passes, visit hangartheatre.org or call the box office at (607) 273-ARTS. For more information about the festival, or to register for Saturday’s workshops, visit empireburlesquefestival.com or email whiskeytangobooking@gmail.com. This year will feature raffles and door prizes, along with handcrafted merch and a fantastic photo booth! $25 per night in advance, $30 at the door.