Waterton, New York:
The women arrived on time; they were, after all, Army wives. Gym-class demure in velour sweat pants, cotton T-shirts and dirt-smudged cross trainers, they looked ready for a Pilates workout.
Until Amanda Knight slipped on a pair of blood-red high heels. And Charlene Jernigan pulled on shoulder-length satin gloves. And Jen McNeil wrapped a blue-and-white feather boa around her shoulders. Then Lily Burana, the instructor, cranked up the music. Vintage Peggy Lee, circa 1966:
"So let me get right to the point.
"I don't pop my cork for every guy I see.
"Hey, big spender, spend a little time with me."
Shoulders dipped, hips thrust, knees bounced, legs kicked, boa feathers fluttered. "One for Uncle Sam, y'all!" Burana shouted.
There is a long and honorable tradition of military wives (and, these days, military husbands) going the extra romantic mile for spouses returning from war. A quiet weekend without the kids. Candlelight dinners. Some slinky lingerie.
But striptease?
Enter Burana, an exotic-dancer-turned-writer-turned-Army-wife who has endured her own deployment blues and is trying to channel the cultural mash-up of her life into a morale-boosting quest. She calls it Operation Bombshell.
Every few weeks, Burana travels to some strip-mall-laced military town and offers 60-minute classes in basic burlesque. Though she knows a thing or two about removing her clothes to thrumming music, nothing much comes off in her classes except boas and gloves. It's part aerobics, part Bob Fosse and part Gypsy Rose Lee, punctuated with a few tricks of the trade. Done properly, she demonstrates, even the faintest lift of the shoulder can say, "Over here, big boy."
It is all quite retro and strictly PG. "This is more Ava Gardner than Britney," she said.
Burana started her class with a quick lesson in burlesque fundamentals. These included the glove strip (pull four fingers with the teeth, bend, slip the tips under a foot and pull off the rest as you stand); the showgirl bounce (hands on hip, right foot forward, a slight dip at the knee); and proper boa tossing (like snapping a whip).
"A little of this stuff goes a long way," she instructed.
No one expects Operation Bombshell to save marriages, though if it encourages a bit of hanky-panky, that would be fine, Burana figures. "You don't owe me a book report," she told the women. Mainly it is about breaking the doldrums of long, lonely deployments.
"Military wives are the strongest women that I know," she said. "It's moving every 12 to 18 months. It's multiple deployments. It's raising your children without a spouse at home. It's trying to work when you're moving as much as you do. All kinds of things that are absolutely mind-bending."
On this wintry day she was teaching wives from Fort Drum, home to the 10th Mountain Division. Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the 10th Mountain's four combat brigades have been in Iraq or Afghanistan a total of 130 months, making it among the Army's most deployed divisions. Early next year, one of those brigades will return to Afghanistan as part of President Barack Obama's 30,000-troop surge.
Most of the dozen wives in this class have husbands in the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, which is scheduled to return from a yearlong tour in Afghanistan this month and next. They were looking to the homecoming with a mixture of joy, relief and trepidation.
For Katie Waage, 24, this is her husband's first deployment and, thanks to bowling nights, helpful neighbors and regular coffee groups, she has found it surprisingly bearable. She was hoping the class would give her "a bit of that sexy feeling" but was now fretting about whether she could remember the routine. (Burana promised to send a cheat sheet.)
For Knight, 32, this is her husband's third deployment, meaning he has been away for 40 months, or three and a third years, since the wars began eight years ago. With two children, ages 1 and 3, and a part-time job teaching political science at a local community college, she has concluded, "I need a wife."
Will she do the routine for her husband? "When they first come home after a year away, you don't really need burlesque," she pointed out. "But maybe in a few months."
Raised in New Jersey, Burana started stripping as a rebellious teenager in need of money. She spent much of her 20s working peep shows and strip clubs in San Francisco before moving to New York and becoming a freelance writer. She eventually chronicled her experiences in a memoir, "Strip City."
The idea for Operation Bombshell came to her about a year ago when she met a young saleswoman at a Victoria's Secret store who was wearing her deployed husband's dog tags. "I had this bizarre wacky moment of divine inspiration to give these women an escape by doing what I do best," she said.
In her latest book, "I Love a Man in Uniform" (Weinstein Books), she describes her unlikely marriage in 2002 to a soldier who taught at West Point and her struggles to gain acceptance among Army wives and their husbands. She notes that West Point once prevented her from doing a book signing on campus because she had been a stripper. (Her husband recently retired from the academy as a lieutenant colonel.)
Rebekah Sanderlin, an Operation Bombshell graduate from Fort Bragg, N.C., said Burana faced a particular challenge winning over officers' wives. Among enlisted soldiers, however, "it's not that uncommon for husbands to have wives who were strippers," said Sanderlin, a writer who is married to an enlisted man. "And some of them still dance."
At the class, Burana walked the women through the "Hey, Big Spender" routine, again and again, using a straight-back chair as a prop for an array of pivots, dives, whirls and kicks. The women's favorite move came on the line, "I can show you a good time," when Burana spread her legs and then snapped them shut. "We're only going to give them that one time," she said. "Then it goes away."
As the women filed out, Waage and Knight lingered, chatting about holiday plans and impending homecomings. When Knight learned that Waage planned to order Chinese takeout and see a movie on Christmas, Knight insisted that she come to dinner.
Standing in an alcove nearby, Burana beamed. "Army wives," she said. "That's what we do."
Until Amanda Knight slipped on a pair of blood-red high heels. And Charlene Jernigan pulled on shoulder-length satin gloves. And Jen McNeil wrapped a blue-and-white feather boa around her shoulders. Then Lily Burana, the instructor, cranked up the music. Vintage Peggy Lee, circa 1966:
"So let me get right to the point.
"I don't pop my cork for every guy I see.
"Hey, big spender, spend a little time with me."
Shoulders dipped, hips thrust, knees bounced, legs kicked, boa feathers fluttered. "One for Uncle Sam, y'all!" Burana shouted.
There is a long and honorable tradition of military wives (and, these days, military husbands) going the extra romantic mile for spouses returning from war. A quiet weekend without the kids. Candlelight dinners. Some slinky lingerie.
But striptease?
Enter Burana, an exotic-dancer-turned-writer-turned-Army-wife who has endured her own deployment blues and is trying to channel the cultural mash-up of her life into a morale-boosting quest. She calls it Operation Bombshell.
Every few weeks, Burana travels to some strip-mall-laced military town and offers 60-minute classes in basic burlesque. Though she knows a thing or two about removing her clothes to thrumming music, nothing much comes off in her classes except boas and gloves. It's part aerobics, part Bob Fosse and part Gypsy Rose Lee, punctuated with a few tricks of the trade. Done properly, she demonstrates, even the faintest lift of the shoulder can say, "Over here, big boy."
It is all quite retro and strictly PG. "This is more Ava Gardner than Britney," she said.
Burana started her class with a quick lesson in burlesque fundamentals. These included the glove strip (pull four fingers with the teeth, bend, slip the tips under a foot and pull off the rest as you stand); the showgirl bounce (hands on hip, right foot forward, a slight dip at the knee); and proper boa tossing (like snapping a whip).
"A little of this stuff goes a long way," she instructed.
No one expects Operation Bombshell to save marriages, though if it encourages a bit of hanky-panky, that would be fine, Burana figures. "You don't owe me a book report," she told the women. Mainly it is about breaking the doldrums of long, lonely deployments.
"Military wives are the strongest women that I know," she said. "It's moving every 12 to 18 months. It's multiple deployments. It's raising your children without a spouse at home. It's trying to work when you're moving as much as you do. All kinds of things that are absolutely mind-bending."
On this wintry day she was teaching wives from Fort Drum, home to the 10th Mountain Division. Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the 10th Mountain's four combat brigades have been in Iraq or Afghanistan a total of 130 months, making it among the Army's most deployed divisions. Early next year, one of those brigades will return to Afghanistan as part of President Barack Obama's 30,000-troop surge.
Most of the dozen wives in this class have husbands in the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, which is scheduled to return from a yearlong tour in Afghanistan this month and next. They were looking to the homecoming with a mixture of joy, relief and trepidation.
For Katie Waage, 24, this is her husband's first deployment and, thanks to bowling nights, helpful neighbors and regular coffee groups, she has found it surprisingly bearable. She was hoping the class would give her "a bit of that sexy feeling" but was now fretting about whether she could remember the routine. (Burana promised to send a cheat sheet.)
For Knight, 32, this is her husband's third deployment, meaning he has been away for 40 months, or three and a third years, since the wars began eight years ago. With two children, ages 1 and 3, and a part-time job teaching political science at a local community college, she has concluded, "I need a wife."
Will she do the routine for her husband? "When they first come home after a year away, you don't really need burlesque," she pointed out. "But maybe in a few months."
Raised in New Jersey, Burana started stripping as a rebellious teenager in need of money. She spent much of her 20s working peep shows and strip clubs in San Francisco before moving to New York and becoming a freelance writer. She eventually chronicled her experiences in a memoir, "Strip City."
The idea for Operation Bombshell came to her about a year ago when she met a young saleswoman at a Victoria's Secret store who was wearing her deployed husband's dog tags. "I had this bizarre wacky moment of divine inspiration to give these women an escape by doing what I do best," she said.
In her latest book, "I Love a Man in Uniform" (Weinstein Books), she describes her unlikely marriage in 2002 to a soldier who taught at West Point and her struggles to gain acceptance among Army wives and their husbands. She notes that West Point once prevented her from doing a book signing on campus because she had been a stripper. (Her husband recently retired from the academy as a lieutenant colonel.)
Rebekah Sanderlin, an Operation Bombshell graduate from Fort Bragg, N.C., said Burana faced a particular challenge winning over officers' wives. Among enlisted soldiers, however, "it's not that uncommon for husbands to have wives who were strippers," said Sanderlin, a writer who is married to an enlisted man. "And some of them still dance."
At the class, Burana walked the women through the "Hey, Big Spender" routine, again and again, using a straight-back chair as a prop for an array of pivots, dives, whirls and kicks. The women's favorite move came on the line, "I can show you a good time," when Burana spread her legs and then snapped them shut. "We're only going to give them that one time," she said. "Then it goes away."
As the women filed out, Waage and Knight lingered, chatting about holiday plans and impending homecomings. When Knight learned that Waage planned to order Chinese takeout and see a movie on Christmas, Knight insisted that she come to dinner.
Standing in an alcove nearby, Burana beamed. "Army wives," she said. "That's what we do."
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