Miss Exotic World Pageant
Exotic World hosts the annual Miss Exotic World pageant on the first Saturday of every June. Each year a Neo-burlesque performer is crowned Miss Exotic World in a contest often referred to as the Miss America of burlesque. Winners receive both the title and a trophy.
Dixie Evans initiated the Miss Exotic World pageant in 1990 as a way to draw people to the museum. She garnered attention by sending out a press release claiming that "Lili St. Cyr, Tempest Storm, Blaze Starr and 30 other alumni of burlesque will all be invited to attend this reunion." While technically true, none of those invitees attended that year. However, the release garnered press attention for the pageant, which was successful enough to become an annual event.
Each contest features burlesque performances by both stars from burlesque's golden age and younger women involved in the New Burlesque scene.
The organization initiated a Hall of Fame whose inductees include:
- Josephine Baker
- Theda Bara
- Candy Barr
- Sheri Champagne
- Ann Corio
- Yvonne De Carlo
- Diana Dors
- Gypsy Rose Lee
- Bettie Page
- Blaze Starr
- Jayne Mansfield
- Chesty Morgan
- Sally Rand
- Lili St. Cyr
- Tempest Storm
- Mamie Van Doren
- Mae West
- Dee Milo
Read more about this topic: Burlesque Hall Of Fame
Famous quotes containing the words exotic, world and/or pageant:
“Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The world is a cow that is hard to milk,—life does not come so easy,—and oh, how thinly it is watered ere we get it!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“No Life can pompless pass away—
The lowliest career
To the same Pageant wends its way
As that exalted here—”
—Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)