I Hate to Be Such a Tease, but I Won’t Be Stripping at the Burlesque Museum

It’s been more than a quarter of a century since the Exotic Dancers League sashayed out of town.

Founder Jenny Lee, known to her fans in strip-teasing days as Miss 44 and Plenty More, moved out of her headquarters at the Sassy Lassy Beer Bust Club in San Pedro -- a personal loss for me since she had just made me an honorary stripper on the basis of an article about her.

Burlesque aficionados can take some comfort in the fact that Miss Lee, after a few stops, set up in the Mojave Desert town of Helendale, on Wild Road, no less. I decided to stay in L.A.

She has since died, but her museum business was taken over by a colleague, Dixie Evans, a.k.a. the Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque. Evans is hosting the annual Miss Exotic World Pageant on June 7 in Helendale.

This is burlesque, not a nude show, and Miss Evans has a strict pasties and G-string dress code for the performers, ages 20 to 75, who are expected to include such luminaries as Tempest Storm, Dusty DeMure, Kolorful Kellita, Sparkly Devil, Gyna Rose Jewel and, of course, the San Francisco Burlesque Orchestra.

Admission to the Helendale museum, which is off Historic Route 66, about halfway between Victorville and Barstow, is $20 per person. And oh, yes, you’ll need to pay a separate $20 admission charge for that video camera of yours too.

Alas, I will not be able to appear there this year.

Guide to Adventurous Dining: Today’s specials du column (see accompanying) include:

* a vegetable that will give you a piece of its mind (Ginger McKay);

* a soup that may be a bit more diluted than usual (Terry Kirker);

* and a giant pizza whose maker admits it doesn’t come cheap (Carole Pinette).

Numbers game: Steven Sanger of Cashmere, Wash., wrote: “Why do people in Southern California refer to freeways as ‘the 5, the 10, the 405,’ etc. Everywhere else in my experience it is simply ‘I-5, I-10, or 5 or 10.’ ”

Sanger, who notes he lived briefly in Sunland “off the 210,” added: “These roads also have real names, such as ‘the Golden State,’ ‘the San Bernardino,’ and so on.

And I am wondering if people got in the habit of keeping the ‘the’ when using a number.”

Sanger’s theory sounds logical to me. I would add, too, that motorists down here customarily add a curse word when referring to a freeway -- i.e. “the [darn] 405” -- and a “the” fits in naturally.

Numbers game (Part 2): A few years ago, a San Francisco columnist complained about “creeping Los Angelesization” in the Bay Area. “Should you meet a recent SoCal transplant,” he wrote, “you’ll hear it cluttering up his or her speech. Traffic was bad on ‘the 101.’ Someone took ‘the 280.’ ”

I thought of that column on a recent vacation in “The City,” as San Franciscans call their home. At the time, I was driving on that famous San Francisco thoroughfare, the Embarcadero.

miscelLAny: Discussing the latest of modern annoyances, columnist David Allen of the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin writes that he was dining in Ontario when he heard a baby crying at the next table.

“But there was no baby,” he wrote. “Turns out one diner was using a hand-held PDA (personal digital assistant) to show his companion a video of a baby, who was, of course, crying.”

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Steve Harvey can be reached at (800) LA-TIMES, ext. 77083, by fax at (213) 237-4712, by mail at Metro, L.A. Times, 202 W. 1st St., L.A. 90012 and by e-mail at steve.harvey@latimes.com.