Twenty-seven years after Toni Basil’s chant-song “Mickey” reached #1 on the Billboard charts, the homegrown Las Vegan still has the red, white and blue cheerleader’s uniform that she wore in the iconic music video.

“The Hard Rock Café asked for my cheerleader sweater, but I’m not ready to give it up yet,” says Basil. The famous outfit that she paired with pigtails and pom-poms for “Mickey” is no costume. With the letters “LVH” stitched across her chest, it not only helped launch her career, it was her high school varsity cheerleading uniform at Las Vegas High.

While Basil’s no longer at the top of the charts or wielding pom-poms, she’s never far from the spotlight. The petite performer is an expert choreographer who did Tina Turner’s most recent tour and has worked on films like “Legally Blonde” and “That Thing You Do” and on a spate of music videos.

For the last year and a half Las Vegas audiences have been admiring Basil’s work in the Caesars Palace Colosseum. She is the dance director and choreographer of Bette Midler’s “The Showgirl Must Go On.”

“Bette and I have worked together since the mid-‘70s,” Basil says, “so we kind of know our process.”

For “The Showgirl Must Go On” the old friends searched through footage of diverse styles of dance to create a production that jumps from ballet to street dance sometimes within the same song.

“We just start researching ideas and going through old MGM musicals and their clips and all sorts of crazy things we find on YouTube. … I think we took over a year to develop [the show] and rehearse it.”

Basil names Ed Sullivan, Moms Mabley, Busby Berkeley and the Nicholas Brothers as influences on her choreography for “The People’s Diva’s” Las Vegas show, but her work is no homage.

“As the show evolves it never looks like what our first inspiration was,” Basil explains. “It’s just a push that sends us off.”

In Basil’s own life, the push that sent her into music and dance came from her parents, both Las Vegas performers who instilled in her a love for show business from a very young age.

Before Las Vegas was the entertainment Mecca it is today, Basil grew up in what was essentially a small town. “It was just the Sands and the DI (Desert Inn); it was desert.” Basil’s father was the orchestra leader at the Sahara and her mother’s relatives were “comedian acrobatic dancers. They had about a five-minute act. They did a lot of back flips and comedy.”

Even before she was old enough to go to school, Basil was comfortable performing. Hanging out at her father’s shows at the Sahara, performers like Pearl Bailey would pull the tot on stage.

“I grew up in show business, so I always knew I was going to be a dancer or a performer. I knew that was my business,” Basil says.

In 1982, business took off. As music videos approached their heyday, Basil was signed to a European record company to do a video album: seven songs and seven videos, one album ready for radio play and MTV rotation.

For inspiration Basil turned to her roots: varsity cheerleading at Las Vegas High.

“I was looking around for ideas, and I just always remembered the sound of [the cheerleaders and I] in the gymnasium stomping on that floor and chanting and the echo.”

After donning her Las Vegas High uniform and inserting a chant into the playful song, “Mickey” was born.

“The record company wasn’t so sure it was such a good idea to put a chant into a song, and I said, ‘Let’s use it in the video and then if you ever release the song and you don’t like the chant you can take it out.’

“Now, everyone knows the chant and hardly anyone knows the song.”

While cheerleading was a huge influence on Basil’s choreography circa “Mickey,” her passions run more towards the ever-advancing world of street dance. Basil still takes daily dance classes from instructors like the Jabbawockeez’s Jeff “Phi” Nguyen and choreographer Lil’ C, and follows the development of street dance closely via YouTube clips (“Thank you, YouTube!”), live shows and friends in the dance community. This August, the former member of pioneer locking group the Lockers will receive the Legends of Hip Hop honor from the World Hip Hop Dance Championships, which will take place July 28-August 2 in Las Vegas.

For Basil, another trip to Las Vegs is a welcome homecoming. Regular visits have been an added benefit of working with Midler on “Showgirl.”

“My friends are still my friends,” says Basil. “[Las Vegas has] grown and changed, as all of us have, but it’s still the same. I stay in a house when I’m here that’s three minutes from where I used to live and five minutes from Las Vegas High.”

Decades after graduation, many people still picture Basil in her letter sweater and perky pigtails or do the “Mickey” clap every time the song comes on. Another performers might try to shrug off such a legacy, but Basil, totally enamored of dance and her work, doesn’t let it bother her.

“’Mickey’ is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a one hit wonder,” Basil says with a smile. “I don’t mind having a one hit wonder as long as I have a career in show business.”

She does, of course, and it has been “fabulous.”