After hours: some places you just don't strip

If any modern burlesque dancer, like me or my best friend Annette Bette, wants to feel like a bona fide showgirl there is one place she should perform.

I'm looking up at the building once the London equivalent of Paris's Moulin Rouge - a stage rich with British burlesque history.

My reverie is interrupted by Annette who shows up in a short Forties-style plaid playsuit and sunglasses framing her big red pout. "Ready to pitch our show to these dirty bastards?" She gives me a cheeky wink.

Annette and I work together a lot and go by the name The Coquette Sisters. We want to conquer this stage because of its glamorous past, even if it is now in another seedy Soho strip joint.

We've got to pay off our Swarovski crystal overheads somehow.

It's dark inside, but soon a woman with assertive boobs bounces up the staircase to show us around.

The place is less glorious than in the Thirties but it still has the mythic stage, high ceilings and red velvet upholstery.

What doesn't match is the bigwig in the office downstairs. He looks like Hugh Hefner's doppelgänger - with a smile programmed to be perverted. He has skin the colour of very strong tea and a squared-off silver haircut. He leans back in his leather chair.

"So," he says, clearly preoccupied with deciphering our cup sizes. "You can finish naked, you know." Annette and I keep smiling. "Darling," I say, "burlesque teases the audience by not letting them see all that."

He sends us on our way saying he'll be in touch.

But he won't, and we're glad. It is the least fun part of being a burlesque dancer - occasionally having to deal with these kinds of people. But I cheer up instantly when Annette and I move on to my favourite part - getting ready.

We have a gig tonight at Die Freshe Muse, a 1920s Berlin-themed "cabaret-and-get-trolleyed" night run by one of our dearest friends, Baron Von Sanderson, down in Dalston - or Dalstonia, as the Baron likes to call it.

"I hope he doesn't go on a ruthless pinching spree again!" Annette leans over me to take the Pears soap from the edge of the bath we're in together.

Two in a bath is always more fun. We like to do it with some Hendrick's Gin and tonic. It's practical too - we can help each other spot where we've missed shaving.