A huge and sparkly Happy New Year to you all. It’s a brand spanking New Year and we are so excited to get it started. 2018 is the year of YOU, the year of kindness, the year of magic and, of course,  the year of BURLESQUE! Put those hands out in front of you and squeeze hard! Tee hee hee! Well what a busy year it has been at House of Trixie Blue, full of adventure and a whole load of shimmies. We…

Balancing act-a life of hats

“Never get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life” I have had to remind myself of this far too regularly for many years and I still don’t always get the balance right. IF you’re still reading…well hello there, I’m Ruby Rox and I live a life of hats. Most people do, some have more than others and everyone who is a burlesque performer will have at some point had a problem juggling their hats.

My hats

My hats-professional Burlesque performer Dance teacher (children) Hen party instructor Special needs support assistant (secondary school)-full time Tynemouth district scouts executive committee member-volunteer Tynemouth Gang show –choreographer-volunteer Landlord

My hats-personal Burlesque performer Girlfriend Being a daughter Sister *3 Other family members Best friends Friends Pet owner *5 ME!

  I love my hats, well most of the time. Although there are those days when it seems completely impossible that you will get everything done. I somehow still manage to function as a normal human being. It also has to be said that some days it can be hard to put on the hats that are slightly more tasking or just not quite as fun! The thing I need to remind myself is that often the hats that suffer are the most important ones, my girlfriend, family, friends and, well me. I suffer first and it shows on my face with outbreaks of cold sores, feeling tired and reaching for a bottle of wine not just a glass!

My exercise gets less as my motivation slips and preparing food is no longer a priority. You may be asking yourself why I am writing about this. It could appear a little odd, but actually the main reason is that burlesque has become the “thing” I do for me, purely for me. It is currently one of my favourite hats. It has the added bonus of becoming a profession as well but that was not the intention when I pursued it. Not only has it made me feel beautiful in my outer skin, creative and better as a performer it has also opened a whole new world of people, places and influences some of which I had no idea existed (especially in Newcastle). It has enabled me to help with that “make a life” part of the quote, you know the important part. It would be wrong at this point to not mention that although my initial baptism into burlesque was in the form of becoming a hen party instructor for “Academy of Burlesque and Cabaret”. My education in burlesque has rather marvellously continued, inspired and been delivered in part by “House of Trixie Blue”.

I really hope you have enjoyed this little insight into Ruby Rox and hope you will pop back to read the next instalment later on in October

Ruby Rox

Thank you for reading. Head on over to The Sapphire Whiskers Facebook page to see a little more of Ruby, the rest of the Whiskers and join in the banter. 

We hope you are enjoying the ‘limbo’ between Xmas and New Year. We love this time here at House of Trixie Blue as we use it for reflection, preparation and PARTYING!!!!!!

This year, rather than keeping our reflections under our hat, we have chosen to share our ups and downs of 2015 with you to see if we did make or break our New Years resolutions…

Ah good old New Years resolutions, we thrive on them and enjoy creating them! but have we managed to make them work this year? Well let’s have a run down together. Here was our New Years Resolutions for 2015 – Original blog post is here

  1 – To Maintain Our Ethos

2 – To Have Fun

3 – To See the World

  A huge deep breath *glup* here we go…

1 – HUZZAH! We did it! We have maintained to our ethos of accessible and inclusive burlesque by providing shows, workshops, courses and burlesque accessories for anyone aged 18+.

We have worked within the community to provide burlesque services (shows/workshops) for various charitable organisations plus we have worked with individual learners who have required our unique approach to teaching burlesque to meet their own needs.

All in all, we believe we have worked so hard to meet this so we are going to give ourselves a HUGE TICK! Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this resolution.

  2 – Ahhhh the name of our game is to have fun and we certainly have managed to do that here at House of Trixie Blue.

We have taught hundreds of lovely ladies and gents burlesque this year, which was so much fun. Teaching is a huge passion of ours and we are very passionate about burlesque, so it has been such a joy to teach such wonderful people week in week out.

Trixie and Scarlet have performed all over the country, in various different shows ran by fantastic producers, not to mention winning a few competitions and tons of backstage banter.  

Finally, we have produced a bevy of burlesque shows this year, just for your enjoyment. We produce these shows to make you happy, smile and have fun. All in all- WE DID IT! We met this resolution. We had fun and hope you did too.

    And finally…

3 – We have seen a ton of the UK this year (from Edinburgh to London and all in-between) but we didn’t manage to venture abroad in 2015. This means we better up our game in 2016 to have a cheeky holiday in the sun or maybe perhaps have a working holiday? So as the buzzer from Family Fortune states, XX, we sadly didn’t manage to make this resolution happen :-(. Ah there is always next year!

  Whatever you are up to this New Years, we hope you have an amazing celebration and start to 2016. Bring on the burlesque banter for 2016 and thank you for your support in 2015. 

Love & Shimmies

House of Trixie Blue

xxx

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with Twerk student Melody Thick

BurlyCon 2014 Class Photo by Don Spiro

My fabulous Twerk and Jerk students!

BurlyCon Music Video Class

with Redbone and Lux LaCroix

Overlooking the Seattle Airport

#jeezymemes

The cast of FRO DOWN at The Can Can Cabaret

with Eva Mae Garnet (San Diego)

Next step is 301! This is a 3 month long course where we work on our own personal stage performances. This isn't happening until the Fall. Which I'm kind of happy about. That gives me time to really think about what I want to do for my performance! I'll also post my ideas on here. :) I'm thinking I will probably drop in on a few 101 classes this Summer though... just to keep up with DA MOVES.

Also, Friday is the performance of the latest graduates from my burlesque school! So excited to go to that so I know what I should expect. Aaaand a little nervous too... not gonna lie!

Hey ya’ll! I’m using this new tumblr as my private burlesque page. I’ve been taking burlesque classes for about 7 months now and will be working my way to that stage sometime this year (if I can muster up the nerve!). This will be my space to share my journey to that stage and post some burlesque type photos because Lord knows I can’t do that on my personal pages. This burlesque journey is a new one for me and only a handful of people even know about it because I know many would not approve. But why should I give a shit? I’m 27 years old and I’m embracing the body I was given. I also have pretty bad social anxiety and diving into this burlesque world has been my way of conquering it and making myself feel confident. My goal for this page is to get myself comfortable with being exposed to strangers so that when it is time for me to hit the stage, I’ll be possibly a little more comfortable. :) So follow me for all things sexy and burlesque!

xo,