What’s Left of the Las Vegas Showgirl?

It’s an old showgirl trick to fasten your G-string to your fishnets with seven small hooks. Too many hooks, and you can see the metal on your tights. And when you’ve spent so much time bedazzling your body—with glitter! With feathers! With sequins! With rhinestones of crystal, glass, acrylic, and resin!—do you really want people to stare at your butt (and, yes, everyone will be staring at your butt) and see… metal? Too few hooks, however, and you risk shifting or overexposure. And here’s the thing about showgirls: They’re sensual. They’re evocative. But most of all, they’re mysterious. And to be mysterious, you gotta leave something to the imagination.

It’s also an old showgirl trick to put nail polish on the back of cheap jewelry so it doesn’t turn your skin green, and to use wig tape to secure your pasties because it’s the gentlest adhesive. And when it comes to pasties, you should try to make your own. Everyone’s cup size, nipple area, and cup-to-nipple ratio are so different, achieving the optimal, fun-and-flirty tassel spin becomes a very personal and particular science. “There’s a physics to it. If you ever can’t get your pastries to spin, you need to make them heavier or longer,” Hazel Honeysuckle says.

Hazel Honeysuckle is a Las Vegas burlesque, show-girl like performer at Absinthe, a modern circus show by the entertainment group Spiegelworld. I don’t know her real name because she won’t tell me. She just shrugs and smiles and flutters her fake eyelashes every time I ask, until I finally get the hint to shut up and let Susan Meiselas—the legendary Magnum photographer known for her journalistic pictures of strippers in the 1970s and workers at an S&M sex club in the 1990s—get her shot.

At the same time, I stare at Hazel’s face. It’s a face I’ve technically seen before, because it’s everywhere in Vegas. It’s on a billboard just off of Route 15 and advertised on the roofs of cabs driving down the Strip. That face belongs to “The Green Fairy”—a female character with coiffed hair, a jet-black beauty mark, and a sparkly green push-up bra that makes her ta-tas look like Aphrodite’s. Yet as I sit in her trailer outside Caesars Palace while she prepares to go on stage, I see a different face entirely. This one is soft and human, framed by balayaged hair that skims her shoulders. She wears a black robe, green sweatpants, and black Crocs with a strawberry charm.