Now we are six

Yes, seriously – today Burlicious is six years old.

Six sultry, strutting, sashaying, suggestive, sexy and just plain sassy years in our corsets and heels, doing our thang with our troupe of gorgeous showgirls.

Blimey! What a triumph of titivation and titillation!

From our very first days, working out our brand new routines in a teeny dance studio where we could see no more than our legs in the mirror, to our current position as pillars of the local entertainment establishment… or something like that.

Join us in looking back fondly at six years of hilarity, creativity, cock ups, classes, performances, friendship, rapturous applause, wardrobe malfunctions, stick-on diamanté, feathers and fun - all the while seeing women blossom in confidence as they dance with us and reconnect with their inner showgirl.

May your dreams be showered with sequins, my lovelies. We truly are very lucky to have fallen into doing this.

Yours, designing zimmer frame routines for the future,

Burlicious x

Eee, but they're game girls!

Tonight, I turned on our beautiful music machine and it refused to utter so much as a squeak (thank you for that, Messrs Bang & Olufsen - I shall be sending the girls round to sort you aaht... and not in a good way).

Desolate, we gave the troupe the option of retrieving their hard-earned dosh and heading home without a class. To a showgirl, they elected to stay and to bodge through the class in some way or another.

That old British spirit of invention did the rest. One of our talented number immediately took to the church piano and gave us a fabulous warm up number on the old ivories. Another produced an iPhone and offered it as a replacement music player. Propped up on the stage and cranked up to maximum volume it created barely a whisper at the back of the room, leaving our showgirls there reliant almost entirely on visual cues to know where they were in the song.

Already one down in the shape of the Sparkly Bra Pixie, the Voluptuous Jules and I tried to dance as quietly as we could so as not to drown out the teeny tiny sound of the music. At one point in the number, there's a fabulous BOOM BOOM BOOM of hips from side to side - sadly, on the iPhone, that was completely inaudible at the back of the room. It became my job to shout BOOM BOOM BOOM like some excitable Basil Brush at the appropriate moment. Otherwise, big chunks of the class took place in mouselike silence as we all held our breath and strained to hear the music.

Trust me, for an amateur troupe, when we perform, we do a really good job. However, what the public never sees is the sheer bodgery that goes on behind the scenes. Tonight was us at our most ridiculous - inaudible music, badly cued by yours truly; and the need for manic concentration by the troupe. And you know what? Our showgirls still managed to master a new chunk of the routine.

Thank you for your positivity and for the laughs, showgirls - we think you're bloomin' brilliant!

Yours, wondering about mime as an art form,

Burlicious x

Tripping the light fantastic

What a fabulous, knockabout, hilarity-filled, car crash of a dance class it was last night. We're at a point in the routine that interweaves:

• each showgirl doing the same thing but one beat apart
• different showgirls doing different things at the same time
• and all of us doing the same thing, trekking in a line like a little series of linked elephants and trying our damnedest not to kick each other in the kneecaps.

It's a surefire recipe for gales of laughter and squeaks of disbelief that we can get the same simple step wrong, time after time after time. To the shouted serenade of "bob flick bob flick bob flick bob flick HALF MOON!" by the Sparkly Bra Pixie and me, we make our way across the room, different showgirls going up and down randomly like a little series of undulating caterpillars.

It's a joy to behold.

In other news, the slow, intertwined grind that was testing the troupe last week is now being managed with aplomb.

Next week, we'll be on to some high kicks and a crisp "ta dah" that'll have the unwary chopping each other off at the ankle.

Poetry in motion, my lovelies, poetry in motion.

Yours, still grinning like a loon,

Burlicious x