Missouri woman finds TikTok fame dancing and shaking her mommy belly — in leotards

Out in front of a Bath & Body Works in St. Joseph the other day, an apple-bottomed blonde wearing a gold leotard, flesh-colored tights and Superwoman socks with dangling red tassels made a spectacle of herself.

That was the point.

She bounded through the crosswalk, legs and arms akimbo. She grabbed the one-way sign at the corner like a stripper and shimmied as cars drove past.

She jumped onto a bench and danced. A woman leaving Crumble Cookies nearby tossed her a glance, quickly, as though such acting out in public was no big deal.

But a few minutes later, two 20-somethings ran up to her and excitedly asked if she would take a selfie with them.

It’s a TikTok world out there, and Missouri comedian ElisabethWykert is making the most of it.

During the pandemic, this 34-year-old wife and mom of two joined thousands of people stuck at home who passed the empty hours making dance TikToks. Most people danced in their living rooms. But Wykert took her talent to the streets. And she hasn’t stopped.

Today she has nearly 600,000 TikTok followers and 11 million likes on her videos. Nearly 100,000 people follow her on Instagram; 89,000 on Facebook.

“Right now, this is a great way for me to express myself, and people to seem to enjoy it,” she said. “I’m just trying to spread good in the world.”

Fans call her the “Golden Unicorn” because of the color of her go-to leotard. She said it was “surreal” when an Instagram follower recognized her in the Atlanta airport.

“I thought if I’m going to be learning these silly dances that you had on TikTok back then, then I might as well go outside and do it on the street because people are driving by and they’re the ones who are having to work and see all this chaos around us,” she said.

“So if for five seconds they can just see me doing this in a weird outfit … you know what, maybe their day would be a little bit better. So … it just kept snowballing and this kind of took over my life.”

The snowball became a comedy tour she launched in January. Upcoming shows will take her to New Mexico, Las Vegas and a couple of stops in California before she heads to London in early October. She’s trying to line up more gigs but it’s hard for this mom to find the time without an agent. (No Kansas City shows yet.)

In Albuquerque, San Diego, Seattle and a handful of other cities so far, Wykert has attracted mostly female audiences who get her jokes about Kegel exercises and new-mom breasts.

“I have a baby who is 4 months old, and so that means my boobs are going to gradually get bigger as this show goes on,” she warned one audience.

She conveys that she just might do anything for a laugh, like squeezing her belly and shaking it like Jell-O when she dances.

She embraced her curves by naming her comedy tour “FUPA on Fleek.” For the uninitiated, FUPA usually stands for “fat upper pubic area.” (“On fleek” is slang for on point.)

In September 2018, Beyonce famously referred to her FUPA in an essay for Vogue in which she described how pregnancy had temporarily changed her body. She called it a “little mommy pouch.”

“I don’t normally do body positive stuff,” Wykert said. “I just am body positive.”

She didn’t set out to make a grand statement about body image. Her fans were the ones who started yakking about her mommy belly.

She was 25 pounds lighter when she started TikTok dancing, but even at that weight people commented on her “alleged” FUPA. Some people were downright mean, she said. Sometimes discussions erupted into ridiculous debates about whether her tummy even qualified as a FUPA. (Insert eye roll emoji here.)

She decided that “if people are going to use the word on me I don’t care. At this point my confidence is through the roof. So I’ll take FUPA back.”

She wrote a song about her “FUPA on fleek” and It became one of her most popular videos. She said it grabs a million page views every time she posts it.

Out on the road now nearly a year after giving birth to her second daughter, “there’s no postpartum shame here … we’re FUPA-ing it up.”

Thank you, Chiefs

She set the video shot recently in the shopping area to “Shake That Monkey” by rapper Too Short. Viewers punctuated comments with emojis of fire, thumbs up, hearts, clapping hands and praying hands from one person begging her to “come to New Jersey.”

So what’s with the leotards, some of them thongs?

“No one else wears them! I just love the ‘80s, leotards,” Wykert said. “I always said I belonged in the ‘80s because my hair was so big. I love the side pony(tail). I brought the side pony back in 2006.”

She recently bought the original Jazzercise tape, circa early 1980s, and is “thinking about doing it live … on my lawn.”

This mama is high-energy, with Jim Carrey’s comic physicality and the endurance of an aerobics instructor. In April she cartwheeled across the lawn of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. Then she stood on the sidewalk in her gold leotard and waved at cars passing by. She filmed that, too.

Fans have seen her jumping, high-kicking, chest-popping and runway-strutting all over the place — in front of her house, in the aisles at Target, on a Seattle street, on airplanes, at Kansas City’s Renaissance Festival and Disneyland, on a football field with semi-pro players and alongside various costumed friends including Santa and a giant pink unicorn. She’s danced with a leotard-wearing Bigfoot, too.

She is not, however, welcome at Walmart. (And has the video to prove it. Hi there, Mr. Security Guard.)

Followers leave comments like this: “I bet you was a fun kid lmao. I act like this around my nieces and nephews. They think I’m crazy. Just big kid at heart.”

In February, she wore a red leotard and gold boots to the Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory parade downtown, where she danced in front of fellow fans. Like with many of her videos, she set the dance to Adele’s anthem “Water Under the Bridge.”

Wykert and her husband, Daniel Sanders, were living in California in 2020 when the Chiefs won Super Bowl LIV against the San Francisco 49ers. To celebrate, she wrote a musical parody, danced to it in a Chiefs-red adult onesie — and social media finally found her.

“She’s always done videos … done weird dances and always been like that,” said Sanders. “But never like this, never in this type of situation.”

Missouri native in L.A.

Her husband of 13 years is her camera guy. They met in church when she was 19 and he was 21.

He’s the one with the iPhone walking backward in front of her, or following her down a sidewalk or store aisle. She directs him. They have filmed many videos right outside their front door on the busy St. Joseph street where they live.

She joked that they can’t shoot inside their house, especially when their 11-month-old daughter is sleeping, because “I get very loud. I yell a lot.”

“I like to joke and say I didn’t know my name was Elisabeth until I was 8. I always thought it was ‘smart-a**,’” she said.

Her mother, Pam Wykert, who has starred in some of her daughter’s videos, confirmed as much.

Wykert grew up northeast of St. Joseph in Union Star, population 400, moved to nearby Savannah in fifth grade and lived in Kansas City while studying communications at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

On a vacation to California with Sanders, she found an acting school with deep Hollywood roots that called her name. See, her goal with all of this is to eventually star in a TV sitcom or act in movies.

“This is it,” she told her husband about signing up for acting classes.

“I thought about it for a while,” said Sanders. “And then I was just like, ‘you know what, we’ve got the ability to do it, so I would rather us go and have her have the opportunity to try it and make it happen, and we ended up staying there for eight years.”

They moved to California and while she was in acting school she stumbled across stand-up comedy. She lied to get her first gig at The HaHa Comedy Club in North Hollywood, a well-known springboard for new comedians.

She told the owners: Sure, I’ve done stand-up.

“I had not,” she said.

Turned out she had a knack for it. She had fun with Missouri in front of California audiences.

“I am from Missouri, the good Kansas City. Is anyone here from Missouri? Yeah, there never is … why I always ask. Nobody every leaves Missouri. They don’t let you get out of Missouri.”

Her act clicked when she added original songs to the routine. She looked ahead to 2020 and decided that would be the year to make a move toward live comedy shows.

The pandemic, though, had other plans.

When everything shut down, she and Sanders did move — back to Missouri.

Miley Cyrus strut

It had to be written in the stars that she would parody Miley Cyrus’ monster hit “Flowers,” in which Cyrus hikes up a paved road in a shiny gold gown high above Los Angeles.

Shiny gold gown. Shiny gold leotard. Destiny.

Wykert rewrote the lyrics to “Flowers” for Mother’s Day this week. In her video she’s strutting down a sidewalk in St. Joseph in dark sunglasses, like Miley, while pinning her hair up on top of her head, a la Miley.

Please just buy me some flowers. A gift from TJ Maxx.

I don’t wanna wait for hours. For cold breakfast in bed.

Maybe we can do dancing. To a silly trend.

Anything but go hungry. For my gift.

Wykert spent two years, from 2019 to 2021, posting three videos every day online, so she is quick to correct any assumption that her TikTok fame came quickly. “People think it’s just an overnight success,” she said. “No.

“So I was doing three videos a day, literally everything and anything. Random commentary on life. I was doing weird voices over stuff. I was doing dances. I had my kids in them. We’ll just put out anything and see what happens.”

Would she have found this fame if she had danced in street clothes? Likely not. She gets asked a lot about her tights and leotards.

“Everyone always asks about the tights,” she said “They’re just like, ‘they look really good on camera.’ Because when we’re outside filming it looks like I’m not wearing anything. People are like, ‘oh my gosh, she doesn’t have cellulite. Her legs are so perfect!’

“No, it’s tights. My legs are so hairy.”

She started selling leotards on Etsy under the name Golden Unicorn because so many fans couldn’t find them in larger sizes. That bugs her because she knows wholesalers have them. But many retailers just don’t sell them in plus sizes.

The bravado of dancing in public in a leotard only stretches so far.

Sometimes, Wykert admitted, it is a bit uncomfortable putting herself out there like that. So sometimes she’ll film when crowds aren’t around.

But that’s also because she doesn’t want to be the rude TikTokker shoving people out of her way in the aisles at Target.

“And in that same regard, if I’m the worst thing somebody sees that day, they’re having a pretty damn good day,” she said, laughing. “Let’s be real.”