IN MEMORIAM

Saying Goodbye to My Stripper Friend

Tammi True was crass and irreverent, and I will miss her terribly.

Sometimes, you work on a story, and it gets much larger than you ever anticipated. In 2010, I pitched the idea for an article on the re-emerging burlesque scene in Dallas. My editor Tim liked it, and thus I began work on my first feature for D Magazine. I initially requested that the article be 3,000 words long. Tim asked for 2,000 words. I gave him 2,755 words. I had dinner with and interviewed numerous burlesque dancers. (Journalism is amazing!)

I got the phone number for Nancy Myers — who went by the stage name Tammi True. She had done burlesque in the 1960s. She headlined at Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club in Downtown Dallas. I went to her house, and I brought a poinsettia because it was almost Christmas. We talked for several hours. I met her again, a week later, and we talked for another few hours. That was the beginning of our friendship. My stripper friend Nancy. (I think she preferred the term “stripper” because it got a bigger reaction from people.)

The first draft of the article was all over the place. Tim needed to know: is this a story about modern burlesque with Tammi True as an interesting footnote or is this story about Tammi with modern burlesque as the coda, i.e…