Bella Blue
Bella Blue has the air of a madam, sitting on a tufted leather throne-like chair, magenta hair, brows, and lips all perfectly coiffed. She is posed facing the stage of the second-story venue that she runs and co-owns, a newly revived version of the Original Nite Cap. With a performance space upstairs and Pulcinella!—an Italian restaurant—downstairs, there are a lot of employees and moving parts to coordinate, and she balances it all with grace like the dancer she is. As the daughter of a first-generation Nicaraguan father, as the mother to two sons, and as the founder of the New Orleans School of Burlesque, she is no stranger to hard work. That work has clearly been paying off, as the Original Nite Cap just celebrated its successful one-year anniversary. Blue, who I met in her space at the packed Salon of Shame ANTIGRAVITY fundraiser last month, invited me back to speak about the history of the venue, meeting her favorite burlesque legends, and how she joined the post-Katrina revival of the artform.
I don’t think I’ve ever done an interview surrounded by so many photos of naked women before.
This is not even all of it! I have a lot of photos and memorabilia. I’ve been doing this for almost 20 years now. The [dancers in the] older ones, I’ve met all of them. A lot of the legends are no longer with us by now but every year there’s a reunion in Las Vegas, which is also a fundraiser for the Burlesque Hall of Fame. So they do the work to smoke out the legends and find where they are, and then they all come and we go, “Oh my God! Legends!” And they go, “Oh my God! You know who we are!” And they sell their signed 8x10s and it’s kind of a big deal to get as many as you can.
Is this an open-to-the-public sort of event or is it all fellow female performers in attendance?
It’s all other performers. It’s specifically burlesque, not drag, so it’s all women but there’s a lot of them who were closeted trans women and kind of the pioneers of that stuff and had very successful careers.
Now that I’m looking around in the daylight, I realize these photos are everywhere.
There’s old posters and shows up the stairwell. They’re in the backstage area too because you need the legends looking over you while you’re getting ready.
Over there, under the air conditioner, that’s Satan’s Angel, she was a very out lesbian and she claims to have invented fire tassels—who knows, for real—but when she was alive, she was very active on Facebook, and if she saw somebody doing fire tassels that she didn’t sanction, she would rip them a new asshole. She was a trip! She was obnoxious and loud. She got kicked out of the Hall of Fame. She was a hoot. We performed together at Boomtown Casino on the Westbank, back in the day. I’ve never met anyone like her… There’s so many good ones. That’s Marinka [“Queen of the Amazons”]. Marinka’s signature move was humping the curtain.
Is there a dancer who you see as the O.G. burlesque queen? Who started it all?
There isn’t really any one person. You have Jennie Lee and Dixie Evans, who were the ones that came together and created the first stripper unions. They were the first people to pioneer the idea that strippers deserved to have rights in the workplace. Dixie was the original creator of the Burlesque Hall of Fame. She lived on a goat farm in Helendale, in the middle of nowhere, in the desert in California. She had trailers and she built out her “museum.” She started doing these tours there, showing all this burlesque memorabilia. She was known as the “Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque” so you would call her and say, “I want to see the museum,” and she would dress up and let you in at a specific time, after she got ready.
Has this artform always been popular or has it gone through phases?
Burlesque went underground for a long time, so you’ve got these older legends who were really doing it up in the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s, then there’s a gap because you have the rise of the sexual revolution, the introduction of porn, things start to change and take shape a lot differently. There’s been a few resurgences and revivals. I believe I am, best as I can tell, part of the fourth wave revival. My revival happened after Katrina. There was a revival in the 2000s, in general. It wasn’t super strong but in New Orleans specifically, it was giant and you saw ripples everywhere. When I first started doing burlesque, there were only two festivals and now you could throw a shoe and hit a burlesque dancer and another new festival.
I’ll admit, I’ve had mixed feelings about going to burlesque shows. Sometimes it’s funny and impressive and I’m having the best time and sometimes I’m so uncomfortable I’ve literally run out crying.
Burlesque is complicated. Sometimes it becomes a platform for people to utilize it as therapy, which is not usually what the audience has in mind. In that case, it’s self-flagellation and a self-fulfilling need to be on stage and work through your shit but then charging people to witness that, if it’s not what they signed up for, that’s a conflict for me, personally. I teach my students that they have to learn their audience and that, for the most part, the general public is going to shows because they need a distraction, they need a break. We have to be grateful that they showed up and give them what they want. My role, as a producer, as a business owner, as a restaurant owner, is to create experiences that give people positive memories.
Let’s talk about this gorgeous space that we’re in and how it’s all yours!
These Original Nite Cap signs are the original signs. Best as we can tell—because there’s only an oral history—this is where it stood. I’ve done my research, there’s no written proof. We’re in a predominantly Black neighborhood and so, this far down St. Bernard, you’re not gonna get the same amount of focus and documentation as other parts of the city have. But this was a huge thoroughfare for Black entertainment back in the day. I have a lot of old neighborhood cats who come in and give us stories of what was there and who was this and that was that. What I’ve been told is that the downstairs was the bar, the owner lived upstairs. The guys renovating it found the signs and restored them. The downstairs was [most recently] The Green Room, which was a business for 12 years and used to be in the back of Siberia until it moved here. The upstairs just kind of sat vacant. When Matt the Hat, the chef, was ready to be done, he passed the place on. I wanted a space that was big enough to teach movement where if I wanted to do performances, I could. My husband [Andrew Principe] wanted to do something that was centered around wine and charcuterie. We were looking for a space that maybe would host both. It wasn’t working out and then [this venue] appeared.
How much did you have to change about the space?
Everything was already built up here: bar, ceilings. We really just had to paint and add artwork and create the stage area. It’s just an outdoor stage. Eventually I will have a skirt for it. Everything’s expensive. One thing at a time.
Skirts aren’t all that necessary in burlesque.
Right! I still have lots more vision of things that I want up here but I’ve started making it what I want it to be, to tell a story, to show history. We’ve got three poles that store [strapped to the ceiling] because I was a stripper on Bourbon Street for many years and I wanted to be able to teach pole and do pole shows. We do a night called “Stripperaoke,” which is really fun. We strip to whatever karaoke music is going on. People love it. We host “Flip it & Reverse It” here, which is a pop-up strip club for all genders and identities, mostly people who would not get hired in a traditional strip club. We try to do it all, as best as we can. It’s not a very big space but we make it happen.
It sounds like being open and accommodating are important elements of this space to you.
My speciality, as an instructor, is that I’m really good at accommodations. I call it x-ray vision. I can look at someone’s body and I can see what’s off, what’s not firing. I’m really good at tweaking and making little adjustments. I just love anatomy. I studied it, as a hobby, for a long time. I’ve done cadaver labs and stuff like that. I’ve taught people who are all over the place as far as size, age, ability, gender. I’ve taught people who have missing limbs, who are in wheelchairs. I’m also an ASL interpreter and there’s usually a way to figure out how to make it accessible to everybody. Nothing’s impossible.
What got you into sign language?
Watching people talk with their hands, it felt like dancing. I was really fascinated by it. There’s only one program through our state, at Delgado. It’s only two years long, and I took it during COVID. I sometimes work as an interpreter. I really wanted the Deaf community to feel like there was a space to feel welcome here so, on Wednesday nights, I work with these two Deaf women who teach basic ASL classes at our spot. The Deaf community here is small, so once when we had a reservation for eight Deaf people to come to the restaurant, I knew there might be more, and we ended up with 35 Deaf customers. It was so community-oriented. I feel like there should always be at least one person in every space who can communicate in sign language. Next, we’re setting up Deaf karaoke nights.
You look exceptionally strong. Were you a gymnast growing up?
Dance! I’ve wanted to be a professional dancer since I was three. It always made me happy. It was what I was good at. It was my escape. I thought it was gonna be more traditional and then it became this and I was like, “Well, I’m still doin’ it.” I always say, “two kids and a hurricane later is how I found my way to burlesque.” I got pregnant right out of high school, had my first kid, worked in hospitality, worked in retail, learned everything I needed to know about running a business by managing Victoria’s Secrets. At one point, I was managing at all three locations. I feel like, because my dad was an immigrant from Nicaragua, I had a very intense work ethic that was unusual for New Orleans. I’ve learned if you keep your head down and hustle here, you can make things happen.
Bella Blue jumping in to help at Salon of Shame on October 1
You’ve gotta work hard to keep a business afloat here.
And you have to build community and can’t be scared that someone else doing something is going to take away from you doing something. Focus on what’s in front of you. That’s how I lead, that’s how I teach, that’s what I practice as a business owner. My motto is, “Eyes on your own paper.” I don’t care what anyone else is up to! I hope they do good. That [philosophy] also comes from sex worker mentality, that when one of us wins, we all win. It’s not perfect but nine times out of 10, sex workers will put their beef aside and help whoever needs help, organize, rally, and be there for people. They are the best at getting shit done. When [Hurricane] Ida hit, there was an underground network of sex workers that distributed funds, food, we bought air conditioners, we got people what they needed and that doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Collaboration over competition, always.
This is a funny aside, but we have to talk about your bathrooms. The first thing that got me excited about this venue was feeling so seen by having access to all of those resources that you put in there: pads, tampons, birth control, tester strips for your drinks…
Working in the SAFE network of bars, the goal is to keep everyone safe, even the person that may be the problem. It’s about being able to stay calm and alert in those situations. This roof takes care of a bunch of people. The people who work for me are all across the board, as far as identity and where they’re from, and there’s something special about feeding people, about being a place where we have houseless people come through, just looking for a soda and a little food, and we feed them. We’ve had people on bad dates and we’ll hide them up here and ask the other person to leave from downstairs. My staff knows they can make mistakes too. The culture here is based on dismantling toxicity. You’re not gonna get sexually harassed. You’re not gonna get bullied. You’re not gonna get screamed at. It’s all OK. I share ownership of the restaurant with my husband and a business partner and we have about 23 employees, all together. We haven’t had a high turnover rate but if this place is not a fit, people see their way out. I’ve lived in Louisiana my whole life. I love New Orleans very passionately. I always have. And what my hope is, in the long term, is that one day somebody will look back and remember me the way that they remember Chris Owens and Ella Brennan, and Dooky Chase and Miss Leah [Chase]—these people who worked very hard to put New Orleans on the map. When I look around this room and I can see a bunch of people that I know are part of marginalized communities and they’re here and they’re good and they’re comfortable and they feel safe, and especially when I see them commingling, that’s when I know this is all working.
For more info, check out dirtydimeproductions.com/originalnitecap.
Top photo by Sabrina Stone
