I'd appreciate the benefit of your experience please!

In Jauary we will be running a 5 week burlesque course at my
place of work with a truly fabulous teacher - Miss Foo-Foo LaBelle.

Over the Christmas period there will be approximately 8500 people through
the doors, a large majority will be large groups of ladies on their staff
Christmas parties. What do you think will be the best way to put accross
what Burlesque is?

So far, I've been shocked by the amount of people who are COMPLETELY
clueless or (worse?) start to snigger and assume its just stripping (pardon my French - their words, not mine! )

We want to encorage glamarous ladies of all ages, shapes and sizes to come out for an evening of confidence building, tail feather shaking fun! And maybe a few cocktails

However i'm now a bit worried - theres not been anything like it in the area before!!!

Advice please!

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If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always had!

I'm assuming you'll be handing out some kind of flyers as reminders for this, so I'd say make sure any image you use outs across a positive image...don't use a picture of a lady in nothing but pasties and a thong! In fact without wanting to sound terriby patronising, why not find an image (drawing or photo) of a larger burlesque lady, so people realise it's not about being either a) a straight off in your face stripper or b) Dita von Teese.
If as you said there are going to be big groups of women try to put across that it's a fun an confidence-boosting course that's great for friends to come to and have a laugh together. And also point them in the direction of sites like this one where they can find out more

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Art:
www.myspace.com/nicolaroscoecalvert

Somewhere in the MOB site is a write up from Kittie Klaws about what EXACTLY Burlesque is. She writes about how Burlesque is NOT stripping, it is "Parody", where it first started etc, maybe she has put soem hting up in the FAQ YOU area? Anyway, I would find that write up and copy it out and use that coz Kittie hit the nail on the head every sentance she typed.

I think most people round here will agree that Kittie's explanation of burlesque is pretty much all you need to get the idea across, but maybe just pick out a few lines to try to sum it up...I imagine if you try to give people something that resembles a small newspaper when they're on a night out, no matter how well written, it's likely to be discarded, whereas a flyer would fit nicely in anyones handbag.

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Art:
www.myspace.com/nicolaroscoecalvert