Burlesque star Angie Pontani and Lady Gaga bandleader Brian Newman, our favorite Valentines

Angie Pontani was raised in Trenton, watching Technicolor MGM musicals from the Golden Age of Hollywood, part of a family she describes as "total stereotypical Italian-American: Frank Sinatra, Rat Pack, Las Vegas, glitz and glamour, mirrored walls. So I kind of grew up in this very eccentric, kind of stylized environment.”

Brian Newman grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland. Playing trumpet, what he now describes as improvisational "goofing off" in seventh grade concert band earned him an invitation to a summer jazz class. Soon he was listening to Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie as well as Nirvana and NOFX.

Their paths crossed, as those of so many dreamers and artists do, in New York City.

She rose in the ranks of New York's resurgent burlesque scene, getting her start at the storied Dutch Weismann's Follies in New York in the mid-'90s. He found himself playing at the provocative intersection between burlesque and live jazz.

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“Who doesn’t like beautiful ladies and striptease?" Newman said. "It was always a good thing to be around, and I figured if I got really good girls to come and dance then people would come and see me too, and it worked.”

They met 15 or so years ago — he was playing in the band for the New York Burlesque Festival, where she's the producer as well as one of the stars.

The now-married couple are proud parents of a 4-year-old daughter, live in Brooklyn and are one of the hippest power couples around, stunning audiences across the country.

“I love working with her because it hearkens back to another era," said Newman. "And even the couple thing, like us being in love and being able to do shows like that together, it reminds me of like Keely Smith and Louis Prima or Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields. These romances that … bred entertainment, bred showbiz.

"It’s amazing to feed off her, feed off each other and the live music. We both know what we like. We both have a lot of the same taste in things, in music and stuff like that.”

“As a couple, when you know each other so intimately and then you’re on stage and you’re performing, it really gives you permission to step out of the bounds of what you might do if you were performing with someone else," added Pontani.

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In true classic showbiz fashion, Pontani and Newman have been particularly busy of late wowing late-night crowds in Las Vegas.

"Brian Newman After Dark" at NoMad at the Park MGM is an unpredictable soiree that's been known to combine red hot jazz, scintillating strip tease and special guests, including the Doors' Robby Krieger, trumpeter Terence Blanchard, R&B star Ashanti and a longtime friend of the starring couple: Lady Gaga.

Newman and Gaga met at a bar in New York's Lower East Side, where he was tending bar and she was working as a go-go dancer, DJ and party promoter. Their subsequent collaborations have included Gaga and Tony Bennett's 2014 "Cheek to Cheek" album. Newman is the bandleader for Gaga's "Jazz and Piano" residency at the Park MGM's Park Theater.

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“We both love this American music and the tradition of American songbook and all that good stuff, so it’s been great to be able to push that to a new audience and have fun, do what we love,” Newman said of his collaborative connection with Lady Gaga.

Newman is spending Tuesday and Thursday nights at the Rose Bar in the Gramercy Park Hotel in Manhattan, and he'll be back in Las Vegas for "Brian Newman After Dark" and "Jazz and Piano" engagements in April and May.

In the meantime, Pontani and her Burlesque-A-Pades troupe are returning to the House of Independents in downtown Asbury Park for the Valentines season spectacular "Burlesque-A-Pades in Loveland" on Saturday, Feb. 15.

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Hosted by Murray Hill, the House of Independents show will feature Pontani alongside Gal Friday, The Maine Attraction, Ben Franklin and Joshua Dean. Newman won't be in Asbury Park this weekend. He and Pontani are hoping to line up a collaborative show for themselves in New Jersey for sometime this summer.

After all these years, Pontani and Newman are still working to expose new generations of fans to their intertwined and classic American artforms.

“It is exciting because even with burlesque now you see people seeing it (for the first time), and even through being in Brian’s shows in Vegas a lot of the people that come are younger and they’ve never seen burlesque, so to them it’s completely new as well," Pontani said. "And it’s really exciting to be getting fans now that are like 21, 22. And so people write and are like, ‘I’m not old enough to come to your show.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m so happy you want to come to my show.’ It’s exciting.”

“It’s classy and classic and just wonderful,” Newman added.

“Well it’s so new," Pontani said. "This audience today, especially the younger part of it, they’ve never seen anything like this. And it’s nice and I always say burlesque is so not Photoshopped. There’s no filter. It’s real and you can see the good, the bad and the ugly. It’s all right there, and I think that there’s something really refreshing about that. And I think actually jazz is a lot like that, too.”

"Burlesque-A-Pades in Loveland," 7 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 15, House of Independents, 572 Cookman Ave., Asbury Park, $18 to $40, houseofindependents.com.