THE STORY OF the Flaming Lotus Girls really starts in 1992, when Charlie Gadeken attended his first Burning Man with his best friend, Dave X, who is now the festival's fire-safety director, in charge of making sure all the seemingly dangerous fire contraptions on the playa are soundly built.

Charlie was a painter back then, doing massive artworks out on the playa – more than 500,000 square feet of printed imagery by his estimate – that he would burn at the end of Burning Man. He called it the Illumination Project, part of the camp he founded and where he, most of the Flaming Lotus Girls, and many other artists still stay at Burning Man: Illumination Village. Dave X got into the fire-arts scene, an insular community that grew mostly out of Survival Research Laboratories, with its disciples going off to form groups like the Crucible and Lightning on Demand.

In the late '90s, Dave X and artist Jim Mason started building flamethrowers for Burning Man as part of what they called the Impotence Compensation Project. Back in San Francisco, most of the group was working out of CELLspace, where Charlie was living and being taught metal fabrication skills by three of his friends: welder Steve Monahan, shop manager Kevin "Tony" Fifield, and Rebecca "Hotmetal" Anders, a CELLspace board member and artist in residence.

In 2000 Dave X had the idea of creating a female-dominated fire-arts group with many of the women he knew who were becoming interested in the medium, including Pouneh Mortazavi, B'Anna Federico, and Tamara Li. Tasha Berg and Lynn Bryant joined up through random channels, and Charlie also joined in. Dave wanted to call the group Professor X and the Flaming Vixens, but the women rejected the idea, instead taking their name from their first project, the fire-spewing flower they called Flaming Lotus.

Four years ago, Charlie moved out of CELLspace and into the Shipyard, in Berkeley, an industrial arts space he formed with Jim. The next year, he and Tony opened the Box Shop in an industrial space in Hunters Point that was built back in the '60s by the Hells Angels (it even includes a hidden underground warehouse that I was unaware of until it was raided, in March, by federal agents, who found a large-scale marijuana-growing operation run by tenants unconnected to the Box Shop).

As the Flaming Lotus Girls moved with Charlie, Dave X has mostly moved on to other projects, although he still visits and helps them out as needed. Tony is a no-nonsense union sheet metal worker who taught many of the originals their welding skills, but he's never been to Burning Man, doesn't want to go, and barely tolerates the Flaming Lotus Girls' dominance of the shop he still co-owns.

Other Flaming Lotus Girls from the early years who are still involved include Stella Rubenstein, Nicola Ginzler, Kezia Zichichi, Suzun Hughes, Colinne Hemrich, and others too numerous to list here. In all, there have been several dozen Flaming Lotus Girls over the years.

STJ