Masterful Morgue Anne Spills Rendezvous Tea, Urges Support for Displaced Performers
Seattle and burlesque have a long history together. One of the most famous burlesque stars, Gypsy Rose Lee, was born in Seattle and performed in vaudeville acts here as a child with her sister June, before diving into her more well-known cabaret career in New York and, later, Hollywood. Gracie Hansen’s uber-glam Paradise International Nightclub, which featured topless dancers, was one of the biggest draws for the adult crowd at Seattle’s 1962 World’s Fair. The Palace Hippodrome a.k.a. “The Palace Hip” was a popular vaudeville theater, whose acts included cabaret, singing, comedy, and a movie theater (opened at 2nd & Spring in 1910 as The Majestic Theatre, renamed as The Palace Hippodrome in 1911; demolished in 1981).
Dancers performing "A Night in Paradise" at the Paradise International Theater, Seattle World's Fair, 1962.
Milkie Studio Collection, Museum of History & Industry, Seattle
While more modern venues—such as Seattle’s beloved, now-defunct Lusty Lady—skirted the line between titillating and bawdy much more closely, the city experienced a resurgence of cabaret and burlesque, including more drag influence in the early-to-mid 2000s that often blurs lines between performance and performance art that continues today.
Whatever your taste, there is no shortage of performances to sate your salacious appetites. From throwbacks of the early 2000s, bizarre-in-the-best-possible-way-punk rock-vaudevillian-style drag shows like Jackie Hell and Ursula Android’s Pho Bang at ReBar; to glam acts like Miss Indigo Blue, The Shanghai Pearl and Ruby Mimosa; Boylesque; the eccentric Cherdonna Sinatra; local characters that skyrocketed to fame due to RuPaul’s Drag Race like Jinx Monsoon and BenDeLaCreme; Seattle’s Moisture Festival (which celebrates comedy and variety acts, including burlesque); festivals that celebrate BIPOC burlesque such as What the Funk?!; to venues like Can Can Culinary Cabaret and beyond—we like our entertainment with a side of risqué.
Morgue Anne (a.k.a. Seattle's Burlesque Super Villainess, Elected Gothic Royalty: The Plague Queen) has been active in Seattle’s entertainment scene for a long time. A self-professed community theater kid through high school, she discovered burlesque around the time she turned 21. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is all the things I love about theater, but with a lot more individual control.’”
In addition to performing burlesque herself, Morgue Anne is also a model and DJ, and hosts various events like Goth Book Club and Cult of Morgue through her production company Morgue Anne Presents. She is at Neighbors every Thursday night for The Dollhouse, an open mic night started by the iconic late Roxy Doll, now continued by her drag daughter Delulu Lemon Doll.
Suffice to say, Morgue Anne is a production force.
Morgue Anne (MA): “I very quickly realized that I didn’t see a lot of the shows being produced that I wanted to be in, so I made the jump into producing, and then over the next 15 years, worked my way up the ladder.”
What kind of shows did Morgue Anne want to see? When many think of burlesque, it’s a shiny, showgirl routine full of expensive costumes and professional props like industry queen Dita Von Teese; and while Morgue Anne has love for that type of burlesque, she wanted to expand the ideas of what burlesque is and who can do it.
MA: “Seattle has always had a thriving arts community, especially in the performing arts. There are a lot of really good, I’ll say ‘upper level’ performers, like people who have graduated from the Academy of Burlesque, people performing at The Pink Door and The Triple Door, these higher echelons.
Morgue Anne on stage
Daniel Chang Photography; Courtesy of Morgue Anne
All that is great and I love that, but there wasn’t as much available for entry-level folks who are just starting out, or shows that were a little more punk rock. Sometimes I just want to scream and thrash around a tiny corner stage in a punk bar.
I ran a show at Substation for a long time called Cabaret of Evil, which was just open-stage. We would accept all the acts that came in and donated all the money to charity. It was all for the love of it. Over time, other spaces opened up, and being a goth, there were also the more spooky shows. I started creating a lot of shows that were more focused on being an open-stage space where people could just sign up and go, alongside some of the bigger shows that became the horror movie burlesque or some other weird idea that I’ve always wanted to see.”
Over the past decade, Morgue Anne has forged a creative home at The Rendezvous, a historic venue in the heart of Belltown, where, until a few weeks ago, you could see everything from live music, to comedy shows, public figure drawing sessions, burlesque performances, and beyond. “I’ve been working at The Rendezvous in one way or another for the last ten years or so. I’ve been the events and booking director for the past three years,” she said. But her experience goes beyond just booking the shows: “I was producing burlesque shows, and needed a sound guy, so I made my boyfriend, now husband, be my sound guy. Then he started getting outside bookings, and I still needed sound help, so he taught me how to do sound, so I have worked my way around and learned all the skills.”
On August 19, Rendezvous’ employees and performers, promoters, and ticket holders that followed the venue’s social media received unexpected and devastating news from new owners Jamie Lee (Co-Executive Director of nonprofit SCIDpda) and Semon Tesfai (also occasionally spelled as “Simon” Tesfai) under the entity MA INDUSTRIES LLC, via a public, anonymous “Letter to Our Community” post. The message, signed only as “The New Owners,” announced the immediate closure of the century-old venue and cancellation of all shows on the full calendar of the upcoming busiest performing arts season.
The “New Owners’” letter posted on Instagram
The Evergreen Echo via Instagram
MA: “Last June or July the owners Max and Alex [Max Genereaux via B.F. Shearer Company, LLC, is listed as the previous owner via Washington Dept. of Revenue] let us know that they had sold, and there was some anxiety at the beginning of July that we were just going to show up to work one day, and the door was going to be locked. I met a couple of times with Semon, the new, current owner, and he reassured me that no, we’re going to try to make this as smooth a transition as possible, we don’t anticipate being closed, and no one is going to show up to everything being locked up. I only had a few really brief meetings with him leading up to the actual transfer of ownership. My job is to be the one that communicates to all the people, so especially as we got closer, I was like, let me know what shows need to be cancelled, what’s going on, and initially they said that the we would cancel the shows during the week of August 11, so that they could do some transfer thing.
In the conversations in the lead up to transfer of ownership, I was reassured that things would be much the same as they had in the previous change of ownership, that things would continue as usual. So that was the information that I was operating under. I think what was especially frustrating for me was the lack of communication. I tried to contact them to ask, ‘Hey, are we going to be open this week? Who do I need to contact?’. I tried to be very proactive. And the week that we were closed that I was aware of, I let everyone know.
The weekend the transfer of ownership papers were signed, we had two comedy shows scheduled for that Sunday. On Friday, I contacted Semon and asked what the plan was for Sunday because we have these shows and I just want to make sure everything is set. He said, well, that’s still going to be under Alex’s (old owner) purview. Great, so I texted Alex and asked who would be bartending that Sunday, because I wanted to make sure everything was ready. And he said, well, that’s going to be Semon’s problem. So I put the two of them in a group chat and said something like, ‘Hey guys, you both said this is the other person’s thing.’
Magically someone produces an email screenshot that says we were going to be closed. The email is from mid-July. They could have told me this, and I could have told those comedians a long time ago. I’m a communicator, my job is talking to the people, producing shows, and communicating what’s going on, making sure they have the resources they need for the success of the show. So it’s very frustrating to get a last-minute surprise that could have easily been avoided. I was asking for information all along the way.
I showed up to work on August 11, and Semon was very surprised to see me there. We talked a bit, and he asked me to cancel any shows coming up that weekend that weren’t private events. He called me later that day, and effectively told me that I wasn’t working at The Rendezvous anymore. That we would work out a contracting situation for the next few weeks, which was very different from what we originally talked about. Things can change though, so I said okay.
Then I went in to meet with him later that week and just encountered a very different person from him than I had previously. He was aggressive, and seemed upset both that I was trying to communicate with him, but also that he didn’t magically have the same information that I had been trying very hard to communicate to him, trying to make sure he had all the resources he needed, while he kept brushing me off. He seemed kind of aggravated, and one of the things that he said was, ‘We can’t even be open because we don’t have all of our permits.’ And I felt like a broken record because of all of the times I had said, ‘If you would have communicated that, I would have been happy to take care of it.’ So after that last meeting there was no trust anymore, communication was very difficult, the way I was spoken to was not acceptable. And it seems like he wants to take The Rendezvous in a new, very unclear direction.
I triple-checked he had all the information that he needed, which I had given over previously. He accused me of withholding information, and I offered to go through all of it with him, and asked him to show me what passwords he was missing. When we finally did get to the part where we were checking Instagram and other accounts, he already had it all and just didn’t seem to know that. On my way out the door, I really tried to make sure that they had everybody’s contact info that I had been communicating with about shows.
Instead of notifying people individually using that contact info, they made that social media post, which had no guarantee that everyone who needed to would even see it. I saw a couple of screenshots later from producers and showrunners that they got a canned email that they were going to be closed indefinitely.
One thing that was very important to me when I kind of took the reins was to hold space for people just starting out, people that were doing weird things. You need the big money-making acts, but you also need the weird stuff. Especially in entertainment, your reputation and your name carries a lot. I think many people are really put off by the way they went about this, that they didn’t sign their names.
I feel very confident in my reputation. I’m not a perfect person, and I’m sure there are people that I have wronged in my many years, but overall I think the community has seen my work, and the people that I have worked with, especially at The Rendezvous, know that I always did my best to communicate and be open. So to try and be so mysterious in an industry where it’s all about your name is an interesting choice and one that doesn’t really inspire a lot of confidence. That place is very special to me and a lot of other people, and Semon made it very easy to walk away from it.
When I left, I made a public post on my social media that my time at The Rendezvous had come to an end. It’s very bittersweet. I’ve worked there in some capacity for ten years; my husband proposed at The Rendezvous. On my last day, I kind of stood in the spot like alright, this might be the last time I stand here.”
Over the next few days, the news spread, hitting Instagram, Facebook, and even Seattle Reddit. Emmett Montgomery, a longtime Seattle comedian, who hosts Joketeller’s Union at Clockout Lounge with Brett Hamil and has both attended and performed shows at The Rendezvous over the years, posted to his Instagram account:
“This week the nameless new owners of the Rendezvous shut it down for renovation, laid off the staff and cancelled all of their shows with most if not all of the producers of events they had already put time and money into finding out about it on social media. For almost two decades I have had the joy of being one of the ghosts in the odd haunted house that was this impossible beautiful thing. I have officiated weddings, produced a beloved basement variety show for almost a decade, been both audience and performer for burlesque and drag and comedy and puppet shows and even opened for Greg Jacobs aka Shock G aka Humpty Hump amongst other brilliant and bizarre moments I was blessed to be part of. It was a place to take beautiful risks and an important part of Seattle's ecosystem. I don't know what type of community the "New Owners" think they will have after burning bridges with the artists and weirdos (many of them marginalized folks doing gorgeous and important things) who they have displaced and financially injured. This is a cruel and ignorant attack on the city I love and a desecration of a sacred space for Seattle strangeness. If you run a venue or creative space please reach out to me because I know of a lot of wonderful things that now need a home and I would love to connect you.”
When Tesfai and Lee were contacted by The Echo for comment, the first response was a canned, evasive email from Jamie Lee detailing her and her husband Semon’s Seattle roots, their ethnicities (Lee is Chinese American, while Tesfai is second generation Eritrean), and indicating that they told the previous booker (presumably Morgue Anne) to cancel August events due to permit issues. Lee then details dates that they communicated intent to fire staff to the seller’s broker, and claims have later reached out via email to them (unspecified, presumably the brokers) for staff that wanted to stay on to contact them. Lee does not address the cancellations for the rest of the calendar beyond August.
For Morgue Anne’s part, she acknowledges that the cancellation of August dates were communicated to her, but insists that nothing else—including the firing of herself and other staff—was relayed until the last minute, despite multiple attempts to contact the new owners for information throughout the process of ownership transfer that she could convey to show producers and performers.
When I responded to Lee and asked her to provide some proof of the emails sent to confirm dates and recipients, instead of a response from Lee, I received an apoplectic, defensive, insulting diatribe from Semon (the first of several) that included everything from claiming that I was acting illegally and in “bad faith” to ask for proof, that I was lax in my “due diligence” by asking them for this proof, disparaging language regarding Morgue Anne’s already-proven abilities of booking talent and producing shows, and claims that Morgue Anne had never handed over the documentation for communication (which Morgue Anne detailed doing during her interview). Additionally, Tesfai accepted no responsibility for the method of firings, instead blaming previous owners for not communicating with staff and said that “I’m not begging for their employment.”
