Throughout her childhood, Fancy Feast dreamed of being a pole dancer. “It just seemed like a more fun, interesting, and expansive way to live one’s life,” Fancy tells The Post. The
Disney Princesses her
Friends idolized were too boring. She preferred the salty strippers in the trash classic film “Showgirls,” which she caught as a kid on late-night TV. “I always gravitated toward the bad girls,” she adds. Fancy — who holds the title of Miss Coney Island 2016 — is a burlesque dancer. She strips, but her acts are more like provocative performance art than pure titillation. (Fancy Feast is her stage name, and “unless you’re writing me a check, there’s no need to know” her real one, she tells those who ask.) She reveals her various sexploits in her new book “Naked: On Sex, Work, and Other Burlesques” (Algonquin Books). She’s eaten cake naked for a Hieronymus Bosch-themed party, stripped for a biker convention in rural North Dakota, and accidentally electrocuted herself on stage. But her interactions — both in burlesque and in other sex-related work — gave her a unique insight into human psychology and led her to a career in mental health. By day, she’s a social worker. Why did you write this book? I had great stories! Initially, I was just excited about getting to represent my community and getting to recreate something more tangible or more lasting out of an art form that is inherently ephemeral. But it became clear that there was something else that this book was about — that it’s not merely fun, cool stories. I’ve been in these segments of the industry in a way that has brought a lot of meaning to my life and has really allowed me to experience in this unique way how we think about sex and bodies and power and desire and performance and subjectivity. And I wanted to share that. Some of your performances in the book are classic stripteases with fans and glamorous gowns, others you’re literally dressed in trash bags or totally drunk. How much work goes into creating an act? Some acts can be put together from conception to execution in the space of a week, and some have been simmering in various stages of production for up to 10 years. Burlesque performers base their choreography around their costuming. Costumes impact how a performer moves, and also what a performer is taking off and in what order. So I have to make sure I have the entire costume ready to go before I start figuring out the act. My favorite dress was made by Diego Montoya, who works a lot with the RuPaul Drag Race girls. It’s a flesh-toned gown, dripping with sparkles, that’s very fitted, with mermaid tulle at the bottom. But it’s designed to rip off in pieces that are full of red velvety blood and viscera. So I come on stage looking absolutely pristine, super glamorous, and then I’m ripping these chunks of bloody flesh off of myself! You’ve toured dilapidated strip joints in the South and emcee-ed the Long Island Garlic Festival. What was your most surreal gig? There are a lot of times where I end up feeling like I’m walking on the surface of
Mars. Performing at a motorcycle rally in rural North Dakota really felt like a huge fish-out-of-water experience. I was having flashbacks to myself as a child, and thinking how I would have no idea I would end up here! Performing at the Metropolitan Opera was also very surreal, especially since during the day I was going to Rikers Island for my internship [being an advocate for people in the criminal justice system]. In the book, I talk about burlesque as a passport, because it’s allowed me these temporary stays in a bunch of different places. You moved to
New York City after college in 2010 to pursue burlesque, and you got a
Job at a sex shop. What did you learn there? I learned people tend to fill the hole that was created by not having adequate sex ed with fear, and with myths. When people would come in to buy a vibrator, they were concerned that the toy would numb them out completely — and ruin their bodies for being able to respond sexually to the touch of a partner. The idea that we can be ruined, that we can do something sexually that makes us frigid or unresponsive — a lot of it is misogyny and sex negativity. Education and communication really is the way to clear that out. You once conducted a workshop for
cancer patients on sex after cancer. What was that like? That was life-changing. That was the moment I realized I wasn’t simply satisfied doing the fun side of retail or being the party gal at somebody’s event with my fun little workshop. It was part of what moved me into my later career in mental health. What are some of the common misconceptions that people have about people who work in sex-related industries? That we don’t have any sense of appropriateness. People believe if there’s some aspect of our life that deals forthrightly with sexuality, then we must be boundary-less, we must have no sense of time or space, and that we are therefore dangerous and have to be sort of eradicated in polite society, or shunted into nightlife only. People are people. I don’t expect an accountant to be doing taxes when they’re at dinner! We know how to turn it off.